Romney Advisers Helped Craft (National) Health Care Law

[Ian David]

Romney Advisers Helped Craft Health Care Law

NBC News: "Newly obtained White House records provide fresh details on how senior Obama administration officials used Mitt Romney's landmark health-care law in Massachusetts as a model for the new federal law, including recruiting some of Romney's own health care advisers and experts to help craft the act now derided by Republicans as Obamacare."

The records "show that senior White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three health-care advisers and experts who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006, when the Republican presidential candidate was governor of Massachusetts. One of those meetings, on July 20, 2009, was in the Oval Office and presided over by President Barack Obama, the records show."

More:
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/10/11/romney_advisers_helped_craft_health_care_law.html

[OHdem10]

1. Not surprised. We knew it was a Republican type bill. Bob Dole

had an erily similar bill when he ran against Clinton
in the Clinton second term.

We knew the President and Dems were trying to develop
a bill which would appeal to Republicans. Lot of good
that did.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

The Masschusetts law was bipartisan

The law was passed by a Democratic legislature and signed into law by Romney, so it wasn't a fait accompli that Republicans would necessarily reject it. What he didn't count on was the level to which Republicans would go to obstruct anything and everything as long as it had his support and/or name attached to it.

[OHdem10]

3. It is ideologically Republican. To be ideollogically Democratic

it would have had to have at least Public Option
or single-payer.

Health care remains Business controlled completely--Republican.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

5. Government is putting some limits/regulations on insurance companies

and will actively be helping people purchase insurance. Those aren't Republican initiatives by any stretch of the imagination and help move us forward. Yeah, it didn't take us where we wanted to go in one fell swoop but it's arguably going to be better than what it was once fully implemented IMHO.

[Romulox]

6. That's textbook "Third Way" pap--an attempt to co-opt the right's policies. nt

[Proud Liberal Dem]

8. I see it as more of attempt to live within reality myself

Considering that what got passed BARELY got passed, it's hard to see how anything significantly more leftward leaning would've won final passage. The best that we could've gotten in the end would have been a public option but that probably would've been riddled with so many exemptions and other caveats that it would've been rendered useless (more or less). I hear what everybody is saying about health insurance companies and in my own dream world, I think we all want single-payer but it was pretty much this or nothing this go around and I would've preferred this to the nothing we got in 1993-1994. I definitely want to see them come back and tweak things more but that will depend, of course, on cleaning out the teabaggers and electing more progressive-minded people to Congress and the WH.

[court jester]

2. many people will never admit to being scammed. Instead they turn to hating their fellow citizens

that were trying to tell them that they were being scammed in the first place.

One step forward, two steps Barack. It's the third way.

[area51]

4. +1

Of course. What we were given, without even the "lubricant" of a public option, was the 1993 republican health care proposal which mandates people to buy a policy, and basically leaves the serial killer insurance agencies unregulated. Why the fsck is the "democratic" president and congress pushing such a rightwing proposal?

[Romulox]

7. Anybody else think that a News Discussion Forum that tries to avoid the news is in trouble?

This is a BIG story, and ignoring it won't make it go away.