Contributors

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Hospitals are People, My Friend...

For a guy who's supposed to be so smart, Mitt Romney is pretending to be just as dumb as George Bush. He had the following exchange with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes the other day:
PELLEY:  Does the government have a responsibility to provide health care to the fifty million Americans who don't have it today? 
ROMNEY:  Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance, people -- we -- if someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and -- and die. We -- 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.  
PELLEY:  That's the most expensive way to do it.  
ROMNEY:  Well the...  
PELLEY:  In the emergency room.  
ROMNEY:  Diff -- different, again, different states have different ways of doing that. Some -- some provide that care through clinics. Some provide the care through emergency rooms. In my state, we found a solution that worked for my state. But I wouldn't take what we did in Massachusetts and say to Texas, "You've got to take the Massachusetts model.''
This idiotic trope of emergency room visits as "health care" is just as stupid as when Bush uttered it in a speech in Cleveland in 2007. As Romney proudly notes, we have a law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act passed in 1986 under Ronald Reagan, that requires hospitals to provide expensive emergency care to patients regardless of their ability to pay. 

This is a perfectly reasonable law. It has undoubtedly saved the lives of thousands of people who just didn't happen to have their health insurance cards on them after they were pulled out of car wrecks. But EMTALA has caused many hospitals to close because such a high percentage of emergency room care is uncompensated. In this age of skyrocketing medical costs, it's unreasonable to expect hospitals and their customers to foot the bill for free riders who won't or can't pay.

So, why does Romney think it reasonable to have a law that forces hospitals to provide expensive emergency health care free of charge, but it's a total violation of all that's holy to require the patients themselves to get health insurance?

After all, Mitt believes that corporations are people, my friend, including those that run hospitals. Isn't forcing them to provide free medical care a far bigger burden than requiring someone to pay their own way, or get a government subsidy if they can't afford it? Isn't it a violation of the hospital's Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection under the law?

As the godfather of Obamacare, Romney knows his emergency room argument is a fallacy. By explicitly endorsing the idea that hospitals can be forced to provide free emergency room care, Romney implicitly accepts the argument that people should be required to pay their own way.

But the fact that Romney now completely disavows the individual mandate and his accomplishments in Massachusetts underlines the problem with his candidacy: he will change his stance, shake the Etch a Sketch, and say and do anything the radical ideologues in the Republican Party want him to.

2 comments:

Chairman Meow said...

Nikto: But the fact that Romney now completely disavows the individual mandate and his accomplishments in Massachusetts

Romney: ...different states have different ways of doing that. Some -- some provide that care through clinics. Some provide the care through emergency rooms. In my state, we found a solution that worked for my state. But I wouldn't take what we did in Massachusetts and say to Texas, "You've got to take the Massachusetts model."

Is Nikto actually capable of reading and understanding anything at all, even his own posts? The crazy-quilt Alice in Wonderland "logic" is, well, a Markadelphian wonder. At least Romney seems to understand the concept of federalism, though like most politicians he's a bit of a weathervane. I wonder Nikto-anus thinks of Obama's flips and more numerous flops and broken promises, and whether that's "the problem with the Obama candidacy"?

GuardDuck said...

a law that forces hospitals to provide expensive emergency health care free of charge,

has caused many hospitals to close because such a high percentage of emergency room care is uncompensated


What? Did you just point to a law, passed by the government, that caused a market to distort and be inefficient? Be careful there N, else Mark will start claiming that you have a pathological hatred of government.