No Health Insurance? No problem. Romney Says That Freeloading In The ER Is Now All Good
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/09/24/no-health-insurance-no-problem-romney-says-that-freeloading-in-the-er-is-now-all-good/
No Health Insurance? No problem. Romney Says That Freeloading In The ER Is Now All Good
Rick Ungar, Contributor
OP/ED | 9/24/2012 @ 11:32AM
Whether you support the candidacy of Mitt Romney or not, we all should be able to agree that his experience as Governor of Massachusetts—at the time when the first universal healthcare law in the nation was conceived and placed into operation—makes him something of an expert on the subject of health care economics.
And that is precisely what makes his comments during last night’s edition of ‘60 Minutes’ all the more bizarre.
When asked whether the nation has a responsibility to provide health care to the 50 million Americans who do not currently have coverage, the Governor responded;
‘Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance. If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. 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.’
Never mind that ‘60 Minutes’ interviewer Scott Pelly was quick to accurately point out that ER care is the most expensive form of treatment that one can access. What is far more interesting is that the remark so clearly puts Governor Romney at odds with the other candidate seeking the presidency—and I don’t mean Barack Obama.
I refer, of course, to the ‘other’ Mitt who seems to come and go at various moments in the campaign, offering up direct contradictions to the positions of the Mitt Romney we watched last night on the CBS news show.
You see, it was the ‘other’ Mitt who said during a 2010 interview over at MSNBC—
‘It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility.’
——> Continued