Mitt Romney’s authenticity appeal on health care

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney used a speech on health care today in Michigan to send a broader message about his commitment to authenticity in the 2012 presidential race.

Speaking to a small group of invited guests and reporters at the University of Michigan this afternoon, Romney, as expected, refused to apologize for signing a health care law in Massachusetts that has drawn unfavorable comparisons among Republicans to the national law put in place by President Obama.

“It wouldn’t be honest,” Romney said about calls for him to apologize for the Massachusetts law. “ I did what I believed was right for the people of my state.”

Later, Romney noted that his current health care proposal was very similar to what he proposed during the 2008 campaign despite the fact that his experience in Massachusetts had gone from a political positive to a negative over the past three plus years. “I am not adjusting the plan to reflect the political sentiment,” Romney said.

After walking the audience through the “why” of the Massachusetts plan, Romney acknowledged that “that explanation is not going to satisfy everybody” and added: “I respect the views of people who think we took the wrong course.”

But, it wasn’t just the words Romney used that aimed to push the authenticity narrative.

He spoke without a prepared script and without a TelePrompter, choosing instead to use a PowerPoint presentation to make his case. He wore no tie. He was accompanied to the speech by just three staffers.

The entire presentation screamed openness, pushing the idea that Romney is someone willing to be transparent about what he believes and why he believes it.

All of that is in striking contrast to the way Romney ran in 2008 when his flip-flops on social issues created a destructive storyline that he lacked conviction on any issue — choosing only to take the politically expedient path in every situation.

He and his political team have clearly made the calculation that the only strategic path for Romney to win the nomination is to “let Mitt be Mitt” — to embrace rather than run from his past records and statements.

That approach is not without political peril. Even before he spoke today, Romney was already faced with a quote from the 1990s unearthed by a liberal Massachusetts blog in which he expressed support for the idea of a federal mandate that would require everyone to purchase some form of health insurance, a major no-no for conservative voters.

And Romney’s opponents for the 2012 GOP nomination will spend untold hours combing through his record to find other instances where, on health care and other issues, he has contradicted himself to try and play up the flip-flop narrative.

But today’s speech was a clear attempt by Romney’s campaign to send the field a message: Romney is done running from his record. The question in the days, weeks and months to come is whether that strategy is the right one.

View Romney’s presentation:

DV.load('http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/89960-mitt-romney-health-care-presentation.js', { width: 454, height: 450, sidebar: false, pdf: false, container: "#DV-viewer-89960-mitt-romney-health-care-presentation" }); ???initialComments:true! pubdate:05/12/2011 15:10 EDT! commentPeriod:3! commentEndDate:5/15/11 3:10 EDT! currentDate:5/14/11 10:15 EDT! allowComments:true! displayComments:false!

View the original article here

Romney leads the GOP field on health care — at least in the real world

What makes Mitt Romney’s health-care troubles particularly perverse is that, by all rights, he’s the one candidate in the Republican field who’s really accomplished something on the issue. This graph uses data from the Kaiser Family Foundation to chart the number of uninsured in each Republican contender’s home state. In states where there are two likely Republicans — say, Minnesota, where both Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann receive their mail, or Texas, which elected both Ron Paul and Rick Perry — I’ve grouped them together. Look who comes out ahead. And not by a little:

Moreover, Donald Trump can’t be blamed for New York’s rate of uninsurance. Tim Pawlenty hasn’t done much to change Minnesota’s health-care system one way or the other. But Massachusetts’s leadership on this graph is substantially due to decisions Romney made as governor. Romney doesn’t look good because the Dukakis administration did the work for him, though the Dukakis administration did pass some important health-care reforms. Romney looks good because he achieved something important.

Romney’s record looks worse, it should be said, if you focus on costs. Massachusetts had the highest per-person costs when Romney took office and it has the highest per-person costs now. His reforms largely dodged the cost issue, arguing that access was a necessary precondition for cost control, and so it needed to be done first. In the individual and small-group markets where his reforms focused, however, insurance has become, on net, more affordable.

To his credit, though, the theory that expanding access can align the political incentives toward cost control is largely working out. The reforms gave the Massachusetts political establishment something to protect, and so they’ve begun focusing seriously on the sort of real cost controls needed to make near-universal coverage sustainable. The Patrick administration has proposed one of the most far-reaching cost control efforts ever seen on the state level, and the state’s largest health insurer is carrying out the most promising payment experiment we’ve seen in some time. Romney has a lot to be proud of, even if he’s not supposed to say so.

???initialComments:true! pubdate:05/13/2011 10:38 EDT! commentPeriod:3! commentEndDate:5/16/11 10:38 EDT! currentDate:5/14/11 10:35 EDT! allowComments:true! displayComments:false!

View the original article here