Can Romney explain how he intends to pay to allow those with pre-existing conditions to get coverage and for young adults to keep their coverage under their parents (conveniently the two most popular provisions of Obamacare) without an individual mandate. Because if those are the only two parts of Obamacare he wants to keep then health insurance premiums are gonna jack up for everybody involved.
That is a most excellent question. Did Mittens make a gaffe, or is it a major tack? I don't know how he can put lipstick on the mandate pig given how the political pawns have been moved in the past, unless he is going the Torie tax credit route, but unless you raise taxes overall to pay for it (another Mittens no-no), the question becomes how you pay for it? Is it going to be some claim of transformational restructuring that makes the delivery more efficient and less redundant? How creditable is that, unless Mittens goes to an HMO structure for Medicare, and that isn't going to copped to either I don't think - certainly not for those over 55.
It appears that Mittens may have put himself in a box. Not good. Am I missing something here?
I think what's going on is the following, though I'm not sure.
It was already the case prior to Obamacare that insurance companies could not deny insurance on the basis of a pre-existing condition
to those with continuous coverage. So if you had one job and were insured, got some condition, and then changed jobs to an employer with a new insurer, the new insurer couldn't refuse to cover you. This avoided the problem of people just signing up when they got sick, since you had to have had coverage already. But Obamacase prohibited denial of coverage even to those who hadn't had coverage before. This of course requires a mandate to ensure that people don't just sign up when they get a diagnosis. Romney's problem (and, in a way, Obama's too) is that a significant chuck of swing voters seems to favor the pre-existing conditions thing and oppose the mandate. Which is kind of incoherent, but there it is.
Now, when pressed on this today, Romney's campaign
later claimed that all he ever meant was that he supports the old thing about pre-existing conditions for people with continuous coverage. So I think what's going on is that Romney's people have decided to say stuff about requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions that's sufficiently vague that it can simultaneously convince voters that he's keeping the popular part of Obamacare and yet also convince media fact-checkers that he's not lying because there's an interpretation where he's talking about the other thing.
