Mitt Romney has zero chance to get the Republican nomination for president. He wrote a book, No Apology. That is his problem. If Mr. Romney wanted to be president he needed a big apology. He needed to step up a year ago and say his biggest mistake in his whole life, business and politics, was putting health care reform in Massachusetts. He cannot continue to defend this when all the results deny that it’s working. He becomes Obama. Becoming Obama is not good these days.
Here are the facts. The uninsured in Massachusetts is now 3%. A family of four in the state now pays $13,788 for insurance. The highest in the country. It’s 27% higher than the national average. Those who pay the penalty just opt in when they are sick. This drives up costs. The state stifles competition in the insurance market and mandates what services the insurance companies must cover. The hospitals that treat the lower income and uninsured are going bankrupt. The state has a critical shortage of primary care physicians. Fifty-six percent of the internal medicine doctors no longer accept new patients. The average time to see one is 44 days. This is driving people to the emergency rooms. For non emergency treatments.
Now, the governor has capped the insurance rate increases at 4.8% vs the 8-32% the companies have requested. They say they will cut payments to providers. That will drive more doctors out of the state. Three of the four insurance providers are showing losses.
What Romney created in Massachusetts is an abject failure. It is very close to what Obama wants to roll out across America. An abject failure. Neither Romney nor Obama will ever take responsibility for the failures. One is in office, for a while. The other will never get near that office.
Unless Mitt has an epiphany, and it’s pretty late for that, since he could have been a key factor in defeating Obamacare, he will lose and lose bad in the Republican primaries. Not facing up to failure is becoming a problem to many Americans today. Romney could have stood up and said I made a mistake in Massachusetts and we should not make that same mistake in the rest of America. He chose the John Edwards route. Denial, despite the truth. Edwards may get the National Inquirer a Pulitzer Prize for exposing his lies. It will take the National Inquirer to out Romney, since no main stream media, except the Wall Street Journal, is outing Romney.