In the Florida presidential debate on Thursday night, January 26 there was quite a debate about Romneycare between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. The exchange went on for several minutes. You can watch it here. Near the end, Mitt Romney told Rick Santorum that Romneycare was not worth getting angry about. I could not disagree with him more!
If there’s any one thing about government to be upset and angry about it is Romneycare, and its nationwide successor, Obamacare. The attempt by the Obama administration to take over the entire healthcare system of the United States of America is a vast overreach of governmental authority and control.
One of the key issues of Obamacare is that of the individual mandate. Santorum rightly pointed out that as a condition of living and breathing in the state of Massachusetts an individual was required to have insurance or pay a fine. Mitt Romney’s advisers have noted, in what will almost certainly be used by Barack Obama in a general campaign strategy against Romney, that Obamacare was based on Romney’s health care plan in Massachusetts.
The subject of Obamacare is going to be a large issue in the fall election campaign, that is unless it is ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court this summer. Should the High Court let the bill stand, then Obamacare will become one of the central issues of the fall campaign. Seeing that this is the Republicans’ one and only chance to overturn this legislation, it is incredibly important that they pick a candidate that can articulate the need for appealing Obamacare. Does anyone seriously think that Mitt Romney is the right candidate to do this? I know that Romney has said in almost every speech that if elected president he will repeal Obamacare, but does he have any credibility on this critical issue?
Obamacare must be repealed and the one chance to do this will be in 2013 when we have a new Republican president and, hopefully, a Republican Senate. If it is not repealed in 2013, the system will become ingrained and we will lapse into Western European-style socialism. We need a conservative president dedicated to repealing Obamacare and we can not afford to wait four more years.
Mark Steyn likes to talk about how large the National Health Service is in England. According to Business Insider, the NHS is the seventh-largest employer in the world. If the English system, not including the remainder of the United Kingdom, is so vast imagine a national health system in the United States. How many people would this system employ and at what cost? It would be almost unfathomable. It would dominate the national debate in the way that the National Health Service dominates British politics and has since the 1950s. Is this the future that we want as Americans? If not, then we better nominate someone besides Romney to challenge Obama in the fall campaign.