MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: Cybjorg)
Okay, get ready and fasten your seat belts, because this is going to be a rant based on fact. But it is so unbelievable, the veracity of this dismaying and convoluted hypocrisy just has to be unleashed.
When Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts he prided himself on getting the state to adopt a hybrid form of expanded health coverage, and he championed an individual mandate. Many features of Romney's plan had been proposed by US Republican senators and congressional representatives for more than two decades.
After all, Romney is a corporatist and "Romneycare" was good for health insurance companies (gave them more paid enrolled lives and increased access to a younger, healthier pool of insured people) – and it was good for pharmaceutical firms who would see an increased number of prescriptions that would be covered. In short, it was a profitable scheme.
As politics would have it, Obama was elected and pretty-much adopted the Romney model, which Romney was still championing – including the individual mandate – until Obama made it his priority piece of legislation. At that point, early on in Obama's first term, the Repubicans – following GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's jihad cry to make the defeat of Obama in 2012 the number one goal of Republicans – followed the lead of GOP strategist and sloganeer Frank Luntz, who advised that the party should eviscerate the Affordable Care Act and demonize it as if it were written by the anti-Christ.
Romney, without a twitch of visible hypocrisy, turned on his own previously vaunted model of healthcare and joined the pile on, vowing that his first act as president would be to repeal the pejoratively-termed "Obamacare." Never mind that he praised himself for the great things it did in Massachusetts; this was not about saving lives, it was about Mitt's ego and getting elected president of the United States. Call Mitt an uber-hypocrite who is willing to let people die for lack of insurance coverage nationally, while he offered that same coverage in Massachusetts, but what are some "loser" lives worth compared to the "importance" of vulture capitalist Romney ascending to lead America into third world status as he oversees the acceleration of outsourcing jobs?
So we get to a Sunday morning pundit talk show on September 9. According to Talking Points Memo (TPM):
“I’m not getting rid of all of health care reform. Of course there are a number of things that I like in health care reform that I’m going to put in place,” the Republican nominee said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.” “One is to make sure that those with preexisting conditions can get coverage.”
Of course, being a Republican, you need the sweepers to follow the candidate and clean up the dung. As TPM clarified, Romney's "campaign later told TPM he wasn’t signaling a shift in policy and was instead referring to his existing stance in favor of protections on preexisting conditions only for those with continuous insurance coverage — not for first-time or returning buyers."
Which is to say, Romney is back to supporting legislation that existed prior to the Affordable Healthcare Act, which still leaves millions in dire need of health insurance for pre-existing conditions uncovered and basically uninsurable.
In short, the so-called pro-life candidate on abortion is once again pro-death when it comes to health insurance coverage.
That the mainstream corporate media doesn't report clearly and forcefully on such basic brazen opportunism and hypocrisy in a candidate's position is another form of abandonment of those who are in dire need of medical care in order to live.
