Joe Vardon, Darrell Rowland, and Joe Hallett, writing for the Columbus Dispatch have an article entitled Romney in Central Ohio | Health care called ‘choice’. Among other things, Mr. Romney says this:
Romney minimized the harm for Americans left without health insurance.
“We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack,’??” he said as he offered more hints as to what he would put in place of “Obamacare,” which he has pledged to repeal.
“No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”
(Emphasis added)
Maybe sometimes. But lots and lots of times, it’s paid for by collection agencies dragging you into court, freezing your bank accounts, and attempting to garnish your wages. I know because I’ve been the attorney working for those collection agencies on thousands of cases. I don’t apologize for it or feel bad – the people who provide services are entitled to be paid. But let’s not gloss over the fact that it’s a pretty awful process for the people who received the services. It’s not like they were, in most cases, frivolous. I’m not collecting against them because they bought a big screen TV or a fancy car. They got sick, and they went to the hospital.
And, it’s horribly inefficient. Getting treatment only after you’re sick enough to go to the ER is like not working to make sure houses have fire extinguishers because, after all, they can call the fire department. This pretty much guarantees that the house is going to be a lot more damaged than it needed to be; and the fire department visits are more expensive to the government than providing the fire extinguishers would have been.
Romney’s position in this matter is uninformed and unnecessarily destructive.
The smarminess and the inaccuracy of this comment is sickening. Millions of Americans with chronic non-emergency conditions are denied care and suffer untreated, and EMTALA only requires stabilization for emergency care.
This country has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, outcomes that are only average, and leaves millions uncovered. And this smirking sociopathic liar defends the status quo.
They should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and pay the damn medical bills by selling their stock holdings, or my borrowing the money from their parents. Isn’t that how everyone does it?
As a provider, it’s no fun going in in the middle of the night or the weekend and working an hour or two and realizing I just lost money because I’m going to pay someone to try to collect an uncollectable debt.
Doug– I think the money quote is further down, where he makes a great defense of the mandate:
“But then once people have all had that opportunity to become insured, if someone chooses not to become insured, and waits for 10 or 20 years and then gets ill and then says ‘Now I want insurance,’ you could hardly say to an insurance company, ‘Oh, you must take this person now that they’re sick,’ or there’d literally be no reason to have insurance.
“It’d be the same thing as saying, ‘Look, you’re not required to have homeowners insurance, but if your home catches fire, then you can get insurance at that point.’ That wouldn’t make a lot of sense.”
Romney is a dick and people who buy this nonsense are stupid.
There is no other way to put it.
We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.
There is a growing body of evidence that demonstrates otherwise. You better shake that Etch-a-Sketch again.
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2012/October/11/romney-uninsured-die-npr.aspx
I guess he never heard of cancer and months or years of chemo. If you can’t pay, you flat out do not receive it. You know, his wife has spoken openly about her chronic, very bad health condition (The same one Michelle Obama’s father had and went to work with every day, if I recall correctly). You would think, even if that didn’t cause a financial hardship for him, that the would have somehow become aware of how it may affect other people who do not share his fortunate circumstances.