Just like Ted Kennedy said about him back in 1994, Mitt doesn't have one position but both on every issue. On ObamaCare he's had every position under the sun at one time starting with when he passed it himself back in Massachusetts to promising to repeal it in that busy first day in office of his-that same day he's also going to ban Planned Parenthood and declare China a currency manipulator.
In his latest, yesterday on the Sunday talk shows, he reminds us that after all, poor people can just show up at the emergency room if they're sick enough. Yet, in the past, Mitt looked upon this as welfare:
"And in a 2007 interview with Glenn Beck, Romney called the fact that people without insurance were able to get "free care" in emergency rooms "a form of socialism."
"When they show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is," he said at the time. "So my plan did something quite different. It said, you know what? If people can afford to buy insurance ... or if they can pay their own way, then they either buy that insurance or pay their own way, but they no longer look to government to hand out free care. And that, in my opinion, is ultimate conservativism."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/23/mitt-romney-60-minutes-health-care_n_1908129.html
Again in 2010:
"When asked in a March 2010 interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" whether he believes in universal coverage, Romney said, "Oh, sure."
"Look, it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way," he said.
And he talked up when he passed ObamaCare in Massachusetts in his book:
"After about a year of looking at data -- and not making much progress -- we had a collective epiphany of sorts, an obvious one, as important observations often are: the people in Massachusetts who didn't have health insurance were, in fact, already receiving health care. Under federal law, hospitals had to stabilize and treat people who arrived at their emergency rooms with acute conditions. And our state's hospitals were offering even more assistance than the federal government required. That meant that someone was already paying for the cost of treating people who didn't have health insurance. If we could get our hands on that money, and therefore redirect it to help the uninsured buy insurance instead and obtain treatment in the way that the vast majority of individuals did -- before acute conditions developed -- the cost of insuring everyone in the state might not be as expensive as I had feared."
Yet, yesterday on 60 minutes he's had another epiphany:
"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance," he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS's "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday night. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care."
So it's multiple epiphany Mitt as well. You wonder where it ends with him. I mean how does he cope with the level of dissonance in his campaign? I mean just to try to reconstruct his positions on healthcare in this race makes you dizzy.
He seems to have settled on a strategy of both D and E:
D) All of the above
E) None of the above
It's like Saturday Night Live said in a skit about him-"I'm Mitt Romney and I'm running on everything."
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