Is Romney a Founding Father of socialized medicine in America? Yes.
Gov. Romney’s plan, developed in collaboration with Heritage Foundation health analysts Bob Moffit and Ed Haislmaier, includes a three-pronged solution that goes a long way towards solving the problem:
Ensuring that all those eligible for Medicaid are covered, which substantially reduces the costs of providing care to the uninsured
Encouraging those who are uninsured by choice to sign up, by using incentives like lower co-pays and premiums along a sliding scale
Creating an affordable product, designed by private insurance companies and coordinated by an “insurance exchange” to make insurance available to all workers, who pay for coverage before taxes
Expanding government health care to cover the uninsured wouldn’t work, Gov. Romney said. “Medicaid wasn’t built as a broad-based all-citizen insurance program,” he elaborated. “Growing Medicaid and adding new, optional populations to Medicaid is very expensive.” Instead, the state turned to the private health industry to develop solutions.
The insurance exchange is an attempt to bring market forces to bear on health care, Heritage’s Ed Haislmaier wrote on National Review Online. “The basic insight behind a state health-insurance exchange is that markets sometimes work more efficiently and effectively with a single administrative structure to facilitate diverse economic activity. That’s exactly what stock exchanges do for the buying and selling of securities. Like a stock or commodity exchange, Romney’s health-insurance exchange would be a clearinghouse but never a product regulator.”