romney v. romney; healthcare

[sd'sker]

Mitt Romney, On 60 Minutes, Cites Emergency Room As Health Care Option For Uninsured

 

Downplaying the need for the government to ensure that every person has health insurance, Mitt Romney on Sunday suggested that emergency room care suffices as a substitute for the uninsured.

"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance," he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS's "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday night. "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 the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care."

When asked in a March 2010 interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" whether he believes in universal coverage, Romney said, "Oh, sure."

"Look, 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 for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way," he said.

And in a 2007 interview with Glenn Beck, Romney called the fact that people without insurance were able to get "free care" in emergency rooms "a form of socialism."

"When they show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is," he said at the time. "So my plan did something quite different. It said, you know what? If people can afford to buy insurance ... or if they can pay their own way, then they either buy that insurance or pay their own way, but they no longer look to government to hand out free care. And that, in my opinion, is ultimate conservativism."

[Undone]

And that, in my opinion, is ultimate conservativism."

 

ROFL. He wouldn't know true conservatism if it spit in his eye.

[carlfense]

Wait . . . Mitt has completely reversed positions on this?!

 

That can't be right.

[ZRod]

I had no idea that non-preventative healthcare was actually a form of health insurance!

[strigori]

For someone who is using his business knowledge as his claim to fame for running for office he is clearly ignorant about overhead. All of us who pay for health insurance pay for the uninsured to use the ER like he is talking about. Hospitals set prices across the board to offset the costs incurred in doing needless ER procedures that could be prevented for a small fraction of the cost by an office visit before something becomes critical. Simply idiotic.