Tag Archives: Taxpayer Funding

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Rick Santorum destroys Mitt Romney on RomneyCare in CNN debate

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Is Rick Santorum right to criticize Romneycare as being essential a state-level version of Obamacare?

Reason magazine explains the similarities between Obamacare and Romneycare.

Excerpt:

ObamaCare, which includes a health insurance mandate, is a near carbon copy of RomneyCare: a hefty Medicaid expansion coupled to equally large middle-class insurance subsidies, new regulations that all but turn health insurance into a public utility, and an individual mandate to buy a private insurance plan. Indeed, the same Obama administration that Romney accused of being fundamentally anti-American has on multiple occasions explicitly cited the plan that Romney signed into law as the direct model for their plan.

Romney’s only real contrast between his plan and the president’s plan boiled down to a single, simple distinction: Obama’s overhaul was a federal overhaul; Romney’s was state-based. Romney would have us believe that the same system of mandates and regulations that constitutes an unconscionable imposition on individual liberty at the federal level is somehow a natural and great part of the American way of life at the state level.

Is Rick Santorum right about the number of “free riders” who choose to pay a fine and get free health care? Of course.

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out this morning:

Uncompensated hospital care [in Massachusetts] rose 5% from 2008 to 2009, and 15% from 2009 to 2010, hitting $475 million (though the state only paid out $405 million). “Avoidable” use of emergency rooms—that is, for routine care like a sore throat—increased 9% between 2004 and 2008.

Romney also decried ObamaCare for failing to lower health costs. He’s right. But the overbudget RomneyCare doesn’t either: Indeed, its designers have explicitly admitted that the state’s plan was to increase coverage first and hope to figure out how to control spending sometime later.

National Review cites a Boston Herald article to explain what RomneyCare did to Massachusetts:

For Mitt Romney, who’s been campaigning on his ability to create jobs, this study from the conservative Beacon Hill Institute can’t be welcome. From the Boston Herald:

The Beacon Hill Institute study found that, on average, Romneycare:

  •  cost the Bay State 18,313 jobs;
  •  drove up total health insurance costs in Massachusetts by $4.311 billion;
  •  slowed the growth of disposable income per person by $376; and
  •  reduced investment in Massachusetts by $25.06 million.

Here’s another must-see clip from my friend Tim:

And another one I found for Jeremy:

Here’s the full transcript of the debate.

Mitt Romney

Rick Santorum

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Does Mitt Romney’s Romneycare health care plan fund abortion with taxpayer dollars?

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Fred Thompson made the point about Romneycare and abortion during the 2008 campaign, and Politifact agreed with Fred’s charge against Romney.

Excerpt:

Fred Thompson’s campaign is trying to take the much-touted health insurance program that Mitt Romney helped create as governor of Massachusetts and turn it into a liability with conservative Republican voters who dominate the party’s primary elections.

The Thompson campaign, which has been playing up the former U.S. senator’s antiabortion stances, sent out this e-mail in November 2007:

“So what sort of services does Romney’s health care plan provide? Per the state Web site: $50 co-pay for abortions.

“While court mandate requires Massachusetts to cover ‘medically necessary’ abortions in state-subsidized health plans, Mitt Romney’s plan covers ALL abortions — no restrictions.”

And it’s true.

One of the crowning moments of Mitt Romney’s tenure as governor of Massachusetts was the creation of Commonwealth Care, a state-run, state-subsidized health insurance program for people making up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level. Although private insurers provide the coverage, the state helps pay the bills and determines what services must be covered.

That list includes abortion. And the co-pay is indeed $50.

Romney has recently sought to distance himself from some details of the plan, but he has touted it in debates and interviews as a model for the nation.

“I love it. It’s a fabulous program,” Romney said during a May 3, 2007, Republican debate in Simi Valley, Calif. “Now I know there’s some people who wonder about it. Sen. Kennedy at the signing of the bill, we were all there together, he said, ‘You know, if you’ve got Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy agreeing to the same bill, that means one thing — one of us didn’t read it.’

[…]Although Romney shares responsiblity with the state legislature and the program’s board, Commonwealth Care was his pet project, and he takes credit for it. We find Thompson’s claims true.

Those are the facts. Romney may say he is pro-life, but he doesn’t have the record of pro-life activism of Rick Santorum, or even the good pro-life voting record of Newt Gingrich.

Many more details of Romneycare and abortion here.

Watch Mitt Romney explain his views on abortion and stem cell research in his own words.

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Hillary Clinton opposes bill to cut taxpayer funding of abortions abroad

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From Life News. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is warning members of the U.S. House that she will personally urge pro-abortion President Barack Obama to veto a State Department funding bill over cuts to groups that perform and promote abortions.

As LifeNews has reported, House Republicans have put forward an appropriations bill that would put the Mexico City Policy back in place. The policy, which President Barack Obama ditched during his first week in office, prevents the funding of groups that promote or perform abortions overseas.

Planned Parenthood is one of the major recipients of millions of dollars through the State Department and the USAID program and the abortion business refused to stop doing abortions or lobbying other nations to change their pro-life laws during the Bush administration so it could receive funds for non-abortion family planning services. The abortion business is lobbying Congress to reject the bill and Clinton took its side today.

Clinton, in the letter, according to CNN, called the bill “debilitating to my efforts to carry out a considered foreign policy and diplomacy” and said she “will recommend personally” that Obama veto the bill. She addressed the letter to pro-life Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who is the chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

[…]Responding to Clinton’s letter, Ros-Lehtinen’s office told CNN the pro-life lawmaker is “disappointed that the Obama administration would stand in the way” of the measure that “blocks U.S. tax dollars from being wasted on foreign organizations, programs, and governments that work to undermine U.S. interests abroad.”

The language of the legislation also bans funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), an agency that has promoted abortions internationally and worked hand-in-hand with population control officials in China who have relied on forced abortions and sterilizations to enforce the one-child policy.

The policy has been a central tenant of pro-life foreign policy during Republican administrations, but pro-abortion presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both scrapped it during their first weeks in office. The policy, first named for a conference in Mexico City where pro-life President Ronald Reagan announced it, ensures taxpayer dollars don’t flow through international family planning programs to organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which claims to have done hundreds of thousands of abortions worldwide.

Despite Obama and Senate Democrats holding up the pro-life policy, Republicans have made inroads into cutting the international pro-abortion agenda.

In April, pro-life Speaker John Boehner secured an budget agreement that, in part, cuts funding to the pro-abortion UNFPA (United Nations Family Planning Agency) that has worked hand-in-hand with Chinese population control officials who have enforced the one-child rule with forced abortions and other human rights abuses.

Still wondering how much Democrats believe in abortion? It’s a sacrament.