With 46 days to go before the general election, Romney is shedding some light on his plans for Americans after he repeal ObamaCare. The Mitt Romney Health Care plan for Americans would be to get your healthcare needs from your local emergency room.
No joke. In an appearance on 60 Minutes, host Scott Pelley got Mr. Romney to shed some details on his plans for the millions of uninsured Americans. Romney replied;
“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance,” Romney said. “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.”
Crazy… yea, I know. Mitt Romney is promising to Repeal ObamaCare – the legislation signed into law by President Obama that finally addresses the health needs of most Americans – and Romney will replace ObamaCare with the suggestion that people get their healthcare from the emergency room.
But wait. That was what Mitt Romney said yesterday. Do we know how he felt about people using the emergency room for their primary care, say… two years ago? We do.
The Huffington Post quotes a Morning Joe interview from two years ago in which Romney said it “doesn’t make a lot of sense” to have millions of uninsured Americans who get “entirely free care” with “no responsibility” from emergency rooms, especially when those people “have sufficient means to pay their own way.”
And in his book, No Apology, Romney recalls the “collective epiphany” that lead to the creation of Romneycare: “The people in Massachusetts who didn’t have health insurance were, in fact, already receiving health care [from emergency rooms].”
He continues:
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.
