Sunday morning on NBC, Mitt Romney said that while he wants to repeal Health Care Reform, he would leave the provisions in place that ban insurers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions, and that require insurance companies to cover children up to the age of 26 on their parents' plans.
Hooray! A moment of humanity from the ice princess!
Not so fast. As soon as Mitt's conservative overlords got wind of it, Romney did a quick 180, and now is against helping people with pre-existing conditions, and with children aged 26 and under.
Let me be more precise. Mitt Romney is now saying that if he's elected president he will take away health care from 6.6 million children that are now on their parents' health insurance plans, and he will once again let insurance companies turn away people with "pre-existing conditions" as benign as psoriasis, high cholesterol and asthma.
In reference to how Romney would deal with those with preexisting conditions and young adults who want to remain on their parents’ plans, a Romney aide responded that there had been no change in Romney’s position and that “in a competitive environment, the marketplace will make available plans that include coverage for what there is demand for. He was not proposing a federal mandate to require insurance plans to offer those particular features.”Then, suddenly, last night the Romney campaign amended their amended statement in an effort to suggest that they would in fact preserve the non-discrimination language concerning pre-existing conditions. Hurray!
But not so fast, a re-read of the new statement makes clear that in fact Romney won't be preserving the pre-existing conditions protections that are in Health Care Reform. Romney simply wanted you to think he was going to preserve it, but he really isn't.
So now he's not simply spineless, he's also duplicitous.
When you're worth a minimum of a quarter of a billion dollars it's of little consequence to you that more than six million children will lose their health insurance because of your incessant pandering to the far right.
But just as serious, this is all the more evidence that Mitt Romney simply believes in nothing. He will be whatever the highest bidder wants him to be. And that doesn't bode well for the rest of us not worth a quarter of a billion dollars.
