If I understand Romney’s position correctly on this issue, his point is that currently there are people amongst the uninsured who can afford health insurance based on their income. When this group is faced with high hospital/doctor bills due to a serious health problem, the bills go unpaid.
Obviously these unpaid bills have to be picked up by somebody since there is no free lunch. That somebody is patients who carry health insurance in form of higher insurance premiums.
So by making health insurance mandatory atleast a portion of the burden is taken off the paying patients.
As for the indigent folks, you can’t extract blood from a turnip. Civilized society is stuck paying for them one way (free emergency room service) or the other (tax payer funded). Ofcourse there is a third alternative. Let the poor people fend for themselves. If they can’t get private charity to pay their bills, they can just suffer through it.
“In 2005, Gov. Romney proposed and in 2006 signed into law an under-funded universal health care plan, including a mandate that all individuals lacking it buy health insurance, substantially similar to Hillary Clinton’s proposed plan. On the stump in 2007, Romney reversed and now opposes his own plan and its central feature, the insurance mandate.”
I wonder how many people in Mass that considered starting small businesses, either chose not to, or chose to move to another state where the government wouldn’t use the police power of the state to force them to provide a benefit they couldn’t afford. The truly poor already have Medicaid, Mitt’s plan is just an expansion of the Nanny State pandering to the near socialists voters in Mass. Now that Romney needs to pander to a different set of voters, he is disavowing his own plan, even as you defend it.
http://rockthetruth.blogspot.com/2007/12/romneys-universal-healthcare-loopholes.html