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Geez – does Mitt Romney’s brain-bone even connect to his tongue-bone?
He went haywire again in a recent TV interview, declaring that there’s no need for the government to make sure that every American has health-care coverage, for there’s always the ER. Launching into a little anecdote to show his connectedness to the real-world of not-millionaires, Mitt explained that “If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance and take them to a hospital, and give them care.”
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Well, actually, since many uninsured Americans don’t get any preventative care, they do indeed suffer a Big One and die in their apartments. That aside, however, plenty of knowledgeable people have pointed out that emergency room care is exorbitantly expensive, so it’s far more sensible to provide universal health care. One of these knowledgeable and sensible people was a guy named – guess who? – Mitt Romney. Asked just two years ago if he supported universal coverage, Romney said “Oh, sure. Look,” he added, “it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care.” The wandering presidential wannabe used to denounce the ER as “a form of socialism” and hail mandatory health insurance as the “ultimate conservatism.”
And don’t forget that the guy who’s now touting the ER as a health-care plan is the same one who passed a mandatory health insurance program in Massachusetts specifically to limit emergency room overuse. And it worked! ER use is way down and 98 percent of Bay State residents now have health coverage (including 99.8% of children).
Maybe that old-but-effective 2006 Romney model could be brought back to replace this year’s defective version of the Romney.
“Mitt Romney, On 60 Minutes, Cites Emergency Room As Health Care Option For Uninsured,” www.huffingtonpost.com, September 23, 2012.