Mitt Romney has always been my default candidate in this race. He’s acceptable, good enough, has some points about him I really like, could beat Obama, and ultimately would be a vastly better President than the current one. And his resume is full of taking economically failing institutions and slashing their waste until they’re successful and profitable again – is there a better job description for POTUS in this election?
But he’s only the default. I’m still looking. I’d like to see if we can do better. And the reason is stuff like this is:
Requiring people to have health insurance is “conservative,” GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney told MSNBC on Wednesday, but only if states do it. [***]
“Personal responsibility,” Romney said, “is more conservative in my view than something being given out for free by government.”
“There were two options in my state,” he said. “One was to continue to allow people without insurance to go to the hospital and get free care, paid for by the government, paid for by taxpayers.”
“The best idea is to let each state craft their own solution because that’s, after all, the heart of conservatism: to follow the Constitution,” he said.
Ugh. This is the problem with Romney – it’s not that he’s “too moderate,” it’s that he just doesn’t seem to have a clear or accurate sense of his own claimed philosophy.
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In this piece, Romney defines conservatism in two ways, first as “personal responsibility,” and then as “follow[ing] the Constitution.” Neither is quite right – the heart of contemporary American Conservatism is individual liberty, with government as a guarantor (not grantor) of that liberty.
Let’s take the first – “personal responsibility.” That comes close to “individual liberty.” But how is forcing citizens at the point of a gun to do something whether they like it or not “personal responsibility”? Indeed – an individual mandate to purchase health insurance on the government’s terms is the exact opposite of personal responsibility. It is government taking over the responsibility a free person would ordinarily have – to take care of himself.
Freedom is not truly freedom if you aren’t free to fail. And that includes being free to be stupid, to get fat, to eat junk food, to not exercise, to not buy health insurance even if you can afford it and then, yes, to face the consequences of such decisions. Setting an alarm at 5:00 AM so you can go running every day to stay in shape is personal responsibility. Having the government health police force you out of bed at taser point to do calisthenics in formation is someone else taking responsibility and control away from you, and assuming it themselves. “Forced personal responsibility” is a contradiction in terms.
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Romney goes on to suggest that without the forced mandate, taxpayers would just be paying for things in the emergency room, as if this was an “either/or” proposition. But the forced insurance mandate is no less a tax, and it’s a damned expensive one. The cost of his plan?
Last year Massachusetts State Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill wrote that Romneycare “was projected to cost taxpayers $88 million a year. However, since this program was adopted in 2006, our health-care costs have in total exceeded $4 billion.”
Romneycare spread the financial pain widely. In June, the Beacon Hill Institute estimated higher costs of $8.6 billion since the law was implemented. Just $414 million was paid by Massachusetts.
Medicaid (federal payments) covered $2.4 billion. Medicare took care of $1.4 billion. Even more costs, $4.3 billion, have been imposed on the private sector — employers, insurers and residents.
As expenses have risen, so have insurance premiums. Economists John F. Cogan, Glenn Hubbard, and Daniel Kessler estimate that Romneycare inflated premiums by 6 percent from 2006 to 2008.
That’s $8.6 Billion above and beyond what would have been paid originally, and all of it is at taxpayer expense one way or another. And the uninsured freeloaders Romney suggests would no longer be a problem in Massachusetts are still costing $400 Million on top of that every year.
One might argue that all this is worth it to get from 90% of Massachusetts citizens being insured to 94.4%. But it is certainly not conservative in any possible way.
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Finally, Romney suggests that his plan is conservative, merely because it’s Constitutional. But Constitutionality is a threshold matter only.
Again, the heart of conservatism isn’t the Constitution, it’s the understanding that government legitimately acts as a guarantor, not grantor, of individual liberties we already inherently possess. There are plenty of perfectly Constitutional things state government can do that nonetheless undermine our liberties and take billions of dollars needlessly out of the productive economy. Romney is right that an individual mandate on the State level is Constitutional while one at the federal level is not, but neither are “conservative.”
(This is a frustration I have with a few tea party folks out there, too, who wave around the Constitution as if it were the Alpha and the Omega of Conservatism. As Justice Scalia once said, “It so happens that everything that is stupid is not unconstitutional.” A 80% income tax rate is clearly Constitutional on the federal and state level (not in Nevada, but most states do have an income tax), but it is just as clearly NOT conservative.)
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There are two possibilities here. Either Romney knows the Massachusetts plan isn’t really Conservative and is just saying whatever he thinks people want to hear whether he means it or not, or he just never bothered to really wonder what his guiding, underlying political principles are. Like most politicians, it’s probably a little of both.
I’m fine voting for a politician I don’t agree with on every issue, or on every philosophical point. Indeed, the only time I’ve EVER voted someone I agreed with on every single point was the time I voted for that Orrin Johnson guy in last year’s Assembly 25 primary.
But Romney has always felt particularly untethered to me. I don’t need the perfect candidate, but I want one who at least knows who and what he is. That’s why I keep looking back at Newt Gingrich, in spite of my many, many reservations about his own peculiar ways of defining “Conservative.” Even so, I still may decide Romney’s the best of the lot, and I’ll enthusiastically vote for him in November if he’s ultimately the nominee.
For now, though, I’m just glad I don’t have to decide who to vote for yet in the caucus.
