Romney on ’60 Minutes’: ED Care Appropriate as Safety Net

The problem with Mitt Romney in this election campaign is not the quality, or even the quantity, of gaffes his campaign so easily produces — it’s the ease with which he dismisses them when challenged. And that’s an issue. To wit, the latest:

The problem with Mitt Romney in this election campaign is not the quality, or even the quantity, of gaffes his campaign so easily produces — it’s the ease with which he dismisses them when challenged. And that’s an issue. To wit, the latest:

In his interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday night, Republican  presidential candidate Mitt Romney pointed to emergency rooms as a form of health care for people without insurance.

[…]

“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance,” Romney told interviewer Scott Pelley. “If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and — and die. 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.”

Romney essentially calls obtaining care in the emergency department an adequate manner of delivering healthcare — because it’s an issue states must address among themselves. Therefore, it is a viable alternative.

When Pelley pointed out that the ER is the most expensive form of health-care, Romney argued that he was talking about a variety of options that vary by state.

“Some provide that care through clinics, some provide that care through emergency rooms,” he said. In Massachusetts, Romney said, they had come up with a different solution — but he wouldn’t push universal care on other states.

But just five years ago, he compared such emergency department “care” to socialism.

And in a 2007 interview with Glenn Beck, Romney called the fact that people without insurance were able to get “free care” in emergency rooms “a form of socialism.”

“When they show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that’s not a form of socialism, I don’t know what is,” he said at the time. “So my plan did something quite different. It said, you know what? If people can afford to buy insurance … or if they can pay their own way, then they either buy that insurance or pay their own way, but they no longer look to government to hand out free care. And that, in my opinion, is ultimate conservativism.”

Gaffe, flip-flop, new talking point. Call it what you will, but such a level of indecisiveness on such a major issue in this election either reflects his total dismissal of health reform at the expense of voters’ lives, or his deliberate and consistent acknowledgment of uber-conservative fiscal policy he plans to implement as president — coutesy of his backers. Incredible.