I usually stay out of the political-talk that surrounds the ACA. But I couldn’t let this go. This is Ron Fournier at NationalJournal (emphasis mine):
On health care, we needed a market-driven plan that decreases the percentage of uninsured Americans without convoluting the U.S. health care system. Just such a plan sprang out of conservative think tanks and was tested by a GOP governor in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.
Instead of a bipartisan agreement to bring that plan to scale, we got more partisan warfare. The GOP resisted, Obama surrendered his mantle of bipartisanship, and Democrats muscled through a one-sided law that has never been popular with a majority of the public.
Walk through this with me. Fournier says we needed a market-driven plan to reduce uninsurance. Then he says that President Obama could have used the conservative plan in Massachusetts, or Romneycare, as a blueprint for doing so. Then, in the next paragraph, he attacks President Obama for instead pushing through a one-sided partisan style of reform.
Can someone help me out here? Is there anyone who disagrees that the ACA was an attempt to bring Governor Romney’s Massachusetts-style health care reform to the nation? We can agree that the final specifics leave some differences between the two, but is anyone contesting that the ACA is not a direct descendant of Romneycare?
