“I like being able to fire people,” GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney said during a campaign stop in New Hampshire yesterday.
This assertion certainly aligns with Romney’s record. As head of Bain & Company, he made millions — we don’t know how many millions because he refuses to release his tax returns — by buying businesses, laying off employees and then re-selling the companies at a profit.
Romney’s statement yesterday was, of course, taken out of context. The statement, in full, went like this:
“I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means that if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I want to say, ‘You know, I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.’ “
Romney appears to be proposing replacing the current employer-based health-insurance system — in which, by the by, the employer not employees, choose insurance providers — with an Ayn-Randian “every man, woman and child for himself or herself” system in which individuals purchase health insurance on the “free” market, the way they buy car or homeowners insurance.
What he’s describing is the failed system we have. Premiums for individual policies are the most expensive on the market. The people who most often need these policies — minimum-wage workers, self-employed creatives, the unemployed — can’t afford them.
In 2010, the GOP tea party won control of the House by promising they would “repeal and replace Obamacare.” Since then, not one of them has proposed a system that would replace the Affordable Care Act after it was repealed by providing coverage to 30 million and 50 million Americans who are uninsured today.
While the current employer-based system fails to cover everyone, it does keep costs down in a modest way by spreading risk among thousands of employees of hundreds of companies who buy insurance collectively. Under the tea-bagger style system Romney described yesterday, by removing the employer-based system and forcing people to buy as individuals in an open, unregulated “free market” system, the percentage of Americans who can’t afford health coverage could rise from approximately one-sixth of us today to — oh, pick a number — 99 percent of us, say, by the end of Pres. Romney’s first term.
But leaving all that tea baggery aside, Romney was lying when he implied that Affordable Care Act would prevent individuals from “firing” their insurance companies — a right that, as noted, “individuals” do not have now if they are insured through their employers. He has to know how the ACA, also known as “Obamacare” and “Romneycare,” works, since he imposed the individual-mandate system on Massachusetts when he was governor — a system that was created by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank.
The fact is, under the ACA, individuals can stay with their employer-based system, if it is the best deal for them, or they can choose to buy insurance from private companies who are registered with government-run exchanges:
Starting in 2014, millions of individuals, families, and small businesses will have access to the same kind of affordable insurance choices as Members of Congress through the purchase of private health insurance through Affordable Insurance Exchanges (Exchanges). Exchanges will offer Americans competition, choice, and clout. Insurance companies will compete for business on a level playing field, driving down costs. Exchanges will make it easy for individual consumers and small businesses to compare qualified health plans. And Exchanges will give individuals and small businesses the same purchasing clout as big businesses.
So, under “Obamacare,” which is based on “Romneycare,” which was based on a right-wing Heritage Foundation plan, individuals who don’t like what an insurer does can “fire them,” go back to the exchange and choose to purchase insurance from another private company.
Remember back in October 2010 when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for Pres. Obama to be a one-term president.”
Since then, he and House Speaker John Boehner and the Republican tea bagger Congress have doggedly pursued this goal, particularly by sabotaging the economic recovery, even though their refusal to build infrastructure and create jobs is devastating their own constituents — all for one reason, the real reason:
To elect this hypocritical, lying one-percenter, Mitt Romney, president in 2012.
I get it. Romney wants to repeal Obamacare to put us back to single payer. After he does that all the private hospitals will go bankrupt because no one can afford to go to a hospital or their insurance costs. Then, the government can buy back all the hospitals (at a profit for the CEOs, of course) and we can go back to good old America just like the Tea Party said. Now, that is keeping a promise.