Greenbeard
Gold Member
- Jun 20, 2010
- 7,664
- 1,646
Romney supports states doing healthcare insurance the way their voters want it, but not at a national level where the FEDs get involved with healthcare.
End of debate.
I often find the right's philosophy on this point pretty muddled. For instance, Romney's website proposed some degree of additional federal insurance regulation along the lines of HIPAA (which the right doesn't seem to mind all that much): "Correct common failures in the insurance market: Ensure that individuals with pre-existing conditions who are continuously covered for a specified period may not be denied coverage."
Much more importantly, Romney says "Eliminate counterproductive federal constraints: Remove barriers to the sale of insurance across state lines." Those barriers, of course, lie at the state level and are a natural consequence of allowing states complete autonomy over their insurance markets. The approach Republicans generally advocate--and the one Romney is apparently clumsily and inaccurately trying to invoke here--is to pass federal legislation stripping states of autonomy over their insurance markets and limiting their ability to regulate products sold within their borders. Say what you will about that approach's alleged merits, it's hardly about "states doing healthcare insurance the way their voters want it."
The cognitive dissonance is even more pronounced on the tort reform side. As I've pointed out before, half of the Republican party supports federal tort reform legislation and the other half thinks that's a violate of states' rights and the Tenth Amendment.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Romney has taken both sides of the argument: "Reduce the influence of lawsuits on medical practice and costs: Cap non-economic damages in medical malpractice lawsuits [federalizing tort law]; Innovation grants for state reforms: health courts, alternative dispute resolution, etc.[incentivizing state-level tort reform]." The federal reform law notably took the latter approach, offering incentives to states to reform their own tort laws.
Anyway, the notion that Romney and others are philosophically against federalizing certain aspects of health care law/regulation is obviously false. It really just depends on when it suits them.