REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE MITT ROMNEY CAN’T HIDE HIS MOST INSIDIOUS FLIP-FLOP
Mitt Romney is such a liar. The contradictory garbage spewing out of this hack on healthcare has set a new standard for deception even for a power-hungry politician desperate to be President. Whatever you think about healthcare policy—and I for one am opposed to the stated plans of both Barack Obama and his Republican challenger because they do nothing to control costs while forcing consumers to buy coverage at inflated rates—it is Romney’s willingness to outright lie over his flip-flops on this issue that is most troubling in considering whether or not he merits being President.
Mitt thought he could get away with those lies concerning his sorry record as governor of Massachusetts because he had his staff destroy electronic messages and other key information documenting it. “When Mitt Romney left office as Massachusetts governor,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “his aides removed all e-mails from a server computer in the governor’s office, and purchased and carted off hard drives from 17 stateowned personal computers.”
But in June of this year, the newspaper obtained a treasure trove of incriminating evidence that had survived the purge. The Wall Street Journal proceeded to publish a devastating exposé based on e-mails that proved it was Mitt Romney who on the state level pioneered the identical healthcare reforms he now blasts Barack Obama for having signed into federal law. The same provision for an individual mandate requiring everyone to purchase health insurance coverage from private insurers, which is the source of controversy over what Republicans have attempted to denigrate as “socialistic Obamacare,” originated with Mitt Romney.
As the e-mails prove, it was then- Governor Romney who first championed this idea as an alternative to the public option being pushed by U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), which was based on an expansion of the government-sponsored Medicare program to supplement private coverage. Romney’s idea that everyone in Massachusetts be forced to purchase healthcare insurance from private insurance companies came out of the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank as a way of killing any expansion of a public option.
The e-mails confirm that the Democrats in Massachusetts, led by Kennedy, were cool to the idea of forcing people to buy health insurance from private companies, but Romney pushed it through. Yet when President Obama abandoned the public option and modeled his national healthcare plan on the one Romney had developed for Massachusetts, Mitt denounced it as socialist.
Yes, his deceit is that blatant, as was revealed in the aforementioned Wall Street Journal exposé: “In Massachusetts, Mr. Romney didn’t include an individual mandate in his original proposal, but soon adopted the idea. The e-mails show his aides later came to champion it, even amid uncertainty from some Democrats. At the time, the mandate was a favored policy of the right, with the left instead pushing for government-run insurance programs (...)