President Barack Obama and Ex-Governor Mitt Romney.
By Adam Stites
Western Sun executive editor
When Obama’s health care plan, dubbed “ObamaCare,” was drafted in 2010, it was met with a firestorm of conservative pundits that argued the plan represented “socialist” values. Yet Mitt Romney, the man that is likely to be the one representing the Republican party in the 2012 presidential election, is responsible for a health care plan passed in Massachusetts while he was governor, “RomneyCare,” that is very similar to ObamaCare.
“They’re the same f***ing bill,” said M.I.T. professor Jonathan Gruber, a former Romney advisor that was instrumental in the construction of the Massachusetts bill, in an interview with Capital New York. “He just can’t have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it’s the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he’s just lying.”
Despite the similarities and the fact that RomneyCare was approved of by over 80 percent of Massachusetts residents in a 2011 Huffington Post poll, Romney has pledged that it is “critical that we repeal ObamaCare.” The fact that he was a pioneer in the development of the bill that he wants to repeal is an irony that is apparently lost on Romney.
The issue is indicative of a larger problem: hyper-partisanship. A word that is defined as “a sharply polarized situation in which political parties are in fierce disagreement with each other.” The Republican and Democratic parties have reached a point where the sole object of their parties is to defeat their opponents, instead of embracing what seem to be similarities.
Actually the fact that Mitt Romney was the first to implement such a system, a system that has become the most expensive in the world and has not brought universal care, and in fact made it harder for many poor and indigent people to get care, shows how bad a system it is. It should be repealed and we should implement a single payer insurance system instead.