2010 Romney: It doesn't make sense to have millions of uninsured people use the ER for healthcare

[Cali_Democrat]

And while Romney refused to agree on Sunday that the government's role is to ensure that every American has health care, he has endorsed such an idea in the past.

When asked in a March 2010 interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" whether he believes in universal coverage, Romney said, "Oh, sure."

"Look, 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, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way," he said.

And in a 2007 interview with Glenn Beck, Romney called the fact that people without insurance were able to get "free care" in emergency rooms "a form of socialism."


Read more with video: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/23/mitt-romney-60-minutes-health-care_n_1908129.html

[newfie11]

1. Ha ha free care in ER

What an ass.

[Tennessee Gal]

2. Flippity flop! Lying scumbag. nt

[maxsolomon]

3. The Post-Truth Politician

He just sites in the middle, saying this, saying that, knowing that none of it matters & no one can call him on it in any meaningful way. Sure, he'll probably lose, but it was always a longshot.

[jody]

4. The American College of Emergency Physicians article "The Impact of Unreimbursed Care on the

Emergency Physician" has credible statistics on this issue. http://www.acep.org/Content.aspx?id=30308

[summerschild]

5. Flip-flop much? AND it sure sounds a lot like REDISTRIBUTION to me!

from the link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/23/mitt-romney-60-minutes-health-care_n_1908129.html

"Getting rid of high numbers of inefficient emergency room visits was actually a key goal of Romney's health care reform in Massachusetts, as he noted in his book "No Apology":

After about a year of looking at data -- and not making much progress -- we had a collective epiphany of sorts, an obvious one, as important observations often are: the people in Massachusetts who didn't have health insurance were, in fact, already receiving health care. Under federal law, hospitals had to stabilize and treat people who arrived at their emergency rooms with acute conditions. And our state's hospitals were offering even more assistance than the federal government required. That meant that someone was already paying for the cost of treating people who didn't have health insurance. If we could get our hands on that money, and therefore redirect it to help the uninsured buy insurance instead and obtain treatment in the way that the vast majority of individuals did -- before acute conditions developed -- the cost of insuring everyone in the state might not be as expensive as I had feared.

[TwilightGardener]

6. Everything that comes out of his mouth is meaningless blather

designed to get him through the day's news cycle. What's striking is not that he's an epic parody of himself in his flip-floppiness (which he is), but that he's still taken seriously as a Presidential candidate.

[Cali_Democrat]

7. Someone needs to make a video

of every single flip flop. It would be epic