Right recoils from Mitt Romney speech

[240 is Back]

 
The reaction on the right to Romney’s much-anticipated Big Speech on health care in Michigan Thursday was overwhelmingly negative, leaving him about where he started, if not worse off.

Conservatives blasted the former Massachusetts governor for his complicated defense of the universal-care law he enacted in the Bay State, while giving him little credit for his detailed critique of President Barack Obama.

“Having now gone through his speech, I think we can all start referring to Romney as a ‘former’ Presidential candidate,” tweeted RedState.com blogger-in-chief Erick Erickson Thursday evening.

It was by no means the only, or even the most, scathing reaction to the speech from the right.

Facing a choice between sticking with a stance loathed by the GOP base or abandoning it and reinforcing the knock on him as a flip-flopper, Romney chose consistency over repudiation.

“I recognize that a lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should just stand up and say this whole thing was a mistake … and walk away. I presume that a lot of folks think that if I did that it would be good for me politically,” Romney said, in the speech’s most-quoted line. “There’s only one problem with that: it wouldn’t be honest.”

But if he was hoping to win admiration for this stand on principle, Romney was disappointed. Between liberal schadenfreude and conservative disdain, there was remarkably little sympathy for the putative Republican front-runner.

National Review responded with an editorial headlined “PowerPoint Failure,” a reference to Romney’s presentation.

“If there is one thing we would expect a successful businessman to know, it is when to walk away from a failed investment,” the editors wrote, noting that the conservative magazine endorsed Romney in 2008.



Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54948.html#ixzz1MLdz51CV

[Soul Crusher]

Romney is being ridiculous for defending his health care plan. 

[Bindare_Dundat]

Sooner or later, all the people that defended guys like Romney will come around to realize the best bet despite some of his flaws is RP.

[Benny B]

Romney is being ridiculous for defending his health care plan. 

You defended it by voting for him in 2008, PEA BRAIN.

[Benny B]

The reaction on the right to Romney’s much-anticipated Big Speech on health care in Michigan Thursday was overwhelmingly negative, leaving him about where he started, if not worse off.

Conservatives blasted the former Massachusetts governor for his complicated defense of the universal-care law he enacted in the Bay State, while giving him little credit for his detailed critique of President Barack Obama.

“Having now gone through his speech, I think we can all start referring to Romney as a ‘former’ Presidential candidate,” tweeted RedState.com blogger-in-chief Erick Erickson Thursday evening.

It was by no means the only, or even the most, scathing reaction to the speech from the right.

Facing a choice between sticking with a stance loathed by the GOP base or abandoning it and reinforcing the knock on him as a flip-flopper, Romney chose consistency over repudiation.

“I recognize that a lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should just stand up and say this whole thing was a mistake … and walk away. I presume that a lot of folks think that if I did that it would be good for me politically,” Romney said, in the speech’s most-quoted line. “There’s only one problem with that: it wouldn’t be honest.”

But if he was hoping to win admiration for this stand on principle, Romney was disappointed. Between liberal schadenfreude and conservative disdain, there was remarkably little sympathy for the putative Republican front-runner.

National Review responded with an editorial headlined “PowerPoint Failure,” a reference to Romney’s presentation.

“If there is one thing we would expect a successful businessman to know, it is when to walk away from a failed investment,” the editors wrote, noting that the conservative magazine endorsed Romney in 2008.



Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54948.html#ixzz1MLdz51CV

The WSJ rips Romney a new butthole...again!

Romney's Daredevil Act
On health care, Mitt tries to bridge the unbridgeable.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." If we may judge by his health-care speech at the University of Michigan yesterday, Mitt Romney is a very smart man.

The likely Republican Presidential candidate fulfilled the White House's fondest wishes, defending the mandate-subsidize-overregulate program he enacted as Massachusetts Governor in 2006 even as he denounced President Obama's national reprise. He then proposed his own U.S. reform that is sensible and might do so some actual good, but which also runs against the other two plans. These are unbridgeable policy and philosophical differences, though Mr. Romney is nonetheless trying to leap over them like Evel Knievel heading for the Snake River Canyon.

Mr. Romney says that Massachusetts was "a state solution to a state problem" and that the other laboratories of democracy should also be allowed to run their own experiments free of ObamaCare's controls. But if Massachusetts is the triumph that Mr. Romney claimed yesterday, well, what's the problem with Washington exporting the same successful model? If an individual mandate to purchase health insurance was indispensable in the Bay State, as Mr. Romney argued, why isn't it necessary in every other state too?

The former Governor outlined a national approach like the one he ran on in 2008. Its core virtue is that it would equalize the tax treatment of health insurance, ending the destructive federal bias for employer-provided insurance over the individual market and encouraging a consumer market for competitive insurance and more efficient medicine. Health economists across the political spectrum have recognized this distortion for decades.

Mr. Romney also tried to draw a contrast between his new campaign plan and Mr. Obama's reform, saying, for instance, that it would create no new health-care bureaucracies. He neglected to mention that his state plan did precisely that. Mr. Romney's political appointees converted the architecture of the "connector" that was supposed to support individual and small-business insurance choice into a regulatory body dedicated to stamping it out.

The political tragedy is that Mr. Romney could have emerged as one of ObamaCare's most potent critics had he made different choices two years ago amid one of the country's most consequential debates in generations. He might have said that as Governor he made a good-faith effort to resolve some of health care's long-running dysfunctions, but that it hadn't worked out and that's why state experiments are valuable.

Mr. Romney also sold his plan using the same theories and language as Mr. Obama, and he might have rebutted the President from experience and evidence. Instead, he has lashed himself to the contradiction of attacking Mr. Obama's plan while claiming his own is different.

Many people have tried to talk Mr. Romney down from this daredevil campaign act, but Mr. Romney privately says he doesn't want to reinforce the rap he had in 2008 that he had reinvented himself too often. As a political matter, however, we think it's better to change positions than to try to defend the intellectually indefensible.

Mr. Romney is not taking our advice, as his nearby letter shows. He even said yesterday that he would do it all over again in Massachusetts, which means he is in for a year in which Republicans attack him on policy while Democrats defend him on policy but attack him as a hypocrite. Who knows what GOP voters will make of all this, but we won't be surprised if Mr. Romney's campaign suffers as many broken bones (433) as Knievel.

[Benny B]

Sooner or later, all the people that defended guys like Romney will come around to realize the best bet despite some of his flaws is RP.

[Soul Crusher]

I admitted my mistake.   You did not.   

[Benny B]

I admitted my mistake.   You did not.   

I don't have to PEA BRAIN. My guy won. lol

You going to admit to your mistake when you vote for him again? 

[Bindare_Dundat]

woopty doo, I guess we'll just pack it now becasue some douchebag schill suggests we should. The more negativity thrown our way, the more they try to exclude, the stronger we get baby. 

[Soul Crusher]

Ron Paul is light years better than Obama, despite some of the nutty stuff. 

[MM2K]

Im going to have to half way defend Romney here guys. Dont get me wrong, everyone has a right to have some major skepticism because of his healthcare law. But I have a problem with people totally writing him off just because of it, and here is why: Some caller to the Rush Limbaugh show pointed out that nobody had a problem with Romeny's healthcare law in 2008 AFTER it had already passed. And Limbaugh supported his argument by pointing out that some conservative publications had actually supported it when it passed, including the WALL STREET JOURNAL.

I think that I myself could forgive him for it if it were not for the price caps that New Jersey is trying to force on insurance companies.

[whork25]

“I recognize that a lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should just stand up and say this whole thing was a mistake … and walk away. I presume that a lot of folks think that if I did that it would be good for me politically,” Romney said, in the speech’s most-quoted line. “There’s only one problem with that: it wouldn’t be honest.”

This actually makes me respect the man. He is not a sellout

[Soul Crusher]

'Universal' care: Fast-track to the E.R.
By MARC K. SIEGEL
Last Updated: 3:55 AM, May 13, 2011
Posted: 9:58 PM, May 12, 2011


More  Print
The Massachusetts "universal health-care system" -- the model for ObamaCare -- is in big trouble after just five years. The latest bad news: a survey from the Massachusetts Medical Society of more than 800 doctors.

The wait time for an appointment is now routinely over a month for primary-care doctors and specialists -- including gastroenterologists, cardiologists, orthopedists and even obstetricians.

Internists and family practitioners report being so overwhelmed -- too many patients, too much time pressure -- that more than half are closing their practices to new patients.


More than half of primary-care docs in Massachusetts find themselves unable to work with Medicaid or Commonwealth Care (state-subsidized insurance), which both pay providers poorly. Yet ObamaCare will add 17 million people to Medicaid, while stuffing others into programs like Commonwealth Care. Who'll take care of these patients?

Routine office visits will give way entirely to the routine emergency-room wait. The American College of Emergency Physicians has found that ER visits are on the rise in Massachusetts, in part due to physician shortages.

So much for President Obama's insistance that his health reform would keep patients out of the ER.

Dr. Alice Coombs, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society, warns that "insurance coverage doesn't equal access to care." Real care involves a one-on-one interaction between a doctor and a patient. The most important healing moments occur during an extended visit when a doctor listens carefully.

But this type of visit is on track to become extinct for all but the wealthy -- choked off by the expanded entitlements and regulations of ObamaCare.

Dr. Marc Siegel is an internist in New York.