I missed the Mitt Romney and Barack Obama twin interviews on 60 Minutes last Sunday but these days we can rely on clips online to bring us the highlights. This one grabbed my attention (transcript below the video):
TRANSCRIPT
SCOTT PELLEY: Does the government have a responsibility to provide health care to the fifty million Americans who don’t have it today?
MITT ROMNEY: Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance, people — we — if someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and — and die. We — we pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.
PELLEY: That’s the most expensive way to do it.
ROMNEY: Well the…
PELLEY: In the emergency room.
ROMNEY: Diff — different, again, different states have different ways of doing that. Some — some provide that care through clinics. Some provide the care through emergency rooms. In my state, we found a solution that worked for my state. But I wouldn’t take what we did in Massachusetts and say to Texas, “You’ve got to take the Massachusetts model.”
END TRANSCRIPT
Ronni here. That makes no sense – particularly it makes no fiscal sense, the kind Romney keeps harping that the nation needs. A couple of years ago, he said he was for a single-payer system so it’s another of those Romney 180-degree flip-flops.
Most of us at this blog are old enough for Medicare and we know the comfort – the comfort all people in every other developed nation know – that our health care needs will generally be taken care of without pushing us into bankruptcy.
Everyone in the United States should have this peace of mind.
At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Johna Ferguson: A Big Problem
