Mitt Romney criticizes shutdown effort

[mystery-ak]

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/mitt-romney-criticizes-shutdown-effort-97476.html?hp=l2


 Mitt Romney criticizes shutdown effort
By: Jose DelReal
September 27, 2013 03:40 PM EDT

Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke out Friday against Congressional Republicans’ strategy to defund Obamacare, holding that it is not “effective.”

“We’re more effective tactically not to use a shutdown of some kind to pursue the … anti-Obamacare objective,” Romney told CNN. “I don’t think that will be as effective.”

Romney’s comments are scheduled to appear on Friday’s episode of CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper”.



Both chambers of Congress must pass a continuing resolution, or CR, by Sept. 30 to keep the government from shutting down.

Earlier this week, the Republican-held House passed a CR that would defund the President’s signature health law, the Affordable Care Act, in an effort to force a vote on defunding Obamacare in the Senate. The strategy has resulted in divisions within the Republican Party, with one faction aggressively pursuing Obamacare defunding through the CR and others decrying the tactic as irresponsible.

On Friday, a version of the continuing resolution was passed in the Senate with the defunding language stripped, essentially putting the onus of a government shutdown back on the House and preventing interference with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.


“I think there’s a better way of getting rid of Obamacare,” Romney said. “[D]elaying it by at least a year. That was Senator Manchin’s idea, the Democrats’ idea.”

“The other [option] would be potentially working hard to get Republicans elected to the House and Senate and they’d be able to do in a traditional way,” Romney said.

[Atomic Cow]

What a surprise, not.

Obamacare is basically Romneycare on steroids.

[truth_seeker]

What a surprise, not.

Obamacare is basically Romneycare on steroids.

Both of which drew from the conservative Heritage Foundation.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/10/20/how-a-conservative-think-tank-invented-the-individual-mandate/

[Oceander]

What a surprise, not.

Obamacare is basically Romneycare on steroids.

Yes, but the thrust of Romney's remarks wasn't that Obamacare deserved to be implemented.

[NavyCanDo]

I know people like beating up on Romney, but he has a lot of company in the Republican Party, those that don’t see the current strategy working. Come October 1st Obamacare becomes effective with government operating or not.   The Republicans need to get back to the "Repeal & Replace" strategy they used during the 2012 election.   It will carry a whole lot more weight now, now that people are starting to wise up. It will be a better campaign strategy again going into 2014 and 2016.

[Rapunzel]

Both of which drew from the conservative Heritage Foundation.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/10/20/how-a-conservative-think-tank-invented-the-individual-mandate/

Your article is from a GOP Debate.. this is from heritage

http://blog.heritage.org/2012/02/06/dont-blame-heritage-for-obamacare-mandate/


Don’t Blame Heritage for ObamaCare Mandate

Stuart Butler

February 6, 2012 at 1:40 pm
 

Is the individual mandate at the heart of “ObamaCare” a conservative idea? Is it constitutional? And was it invented at The Heritage Foundation? In a word, no.

The U.S. Supreme Court will put the middle issue to rest. The answers to the first and last can come from me. After all, I headed Heritage’s health work for 30 years. And make no mistake: Heritage and I actively oppose the individual mandate, including in an amicus brief filed in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, the myth persists. ObamaCare “adopts the ‘individual mandate’ concept from the conservative Heritage Foundation,” Jonathan Alter wrote recently in The Washington Post. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews makes the same claim, asserting that Republican support of a mandate “has its roots in a proposal by the conservative Heritage Foundation.” Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and others have made similar claims.

The confusion arises from the fact that 20 years ago, I held the view that as a technical matter, some form of requirement to purchase insurance was needed in a near-universal insurance market to avoid massive instability through “adverse selection” (insurers avoiding bad risks and healthy people declining coverage). At that time, President Clinton was proposing a universal health care plan, and Heritage and I devised a viable alternative.

My view was shared at the time by many conservative experts, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars, as well as most non-conservative analysts. Even libertarian-conservative icon Milton Friedman, in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article, advocated replacing Medicare and Medicaid “with a requirement that every U.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy.”

My idea was hardly new. Heritage did not invent the individual mandate.

But the version of the health insurance mandate Heritage and I supported in the 1990s had three critical features. First, it was not primarily intended to push people to obtain protection for their own good, but to protect others. Like auto damage liability insurance required in most states, our requirement focused on “catastrophic” costs — so hospitals and taxpayers would not have to foot the bill for the expensive illness or accident of someone who did not buy insurance.

Second, we sought to induce people to buy coverage primarily through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucher, financed in part by a fundamental reform of the tax treatment of health coverage, rather than by a stick.

And third, in the legislation we helped craft that ultimately became a preferred alternative to ClintonCare, the “mandate” was actually the loss of certain tax breaks for those not choosing to buy coverage, not a legal requirement.

Read more of Butler’s article and learn more about Heritage’s position on the Obamacare mandate in USA Today