Mitt Romney is getting hammered for how the Massachusetts health care plan, with its individual mandate, was a model for Obamacare. But columnist Kathleen Parker agreed with some of the defense Romney made last week. “Romney’s central point was that what’s good for one state may not suit another and that states should have the freedom to choose what works best for them rather than have to conform to a federal one-size-fits-all plan, the ultimate costs of which are not really knowable,” Parker wrote. “Whether one likes or dislikes Obama’s health care plan — and there certainly are parts to like — this has always been the crucial point. Keep it small, keep it simple, leave it to the states. Within that framework, what Romney did in Massachusetts is entirely defensible. It was an experiment, it was bold, it was imperfect.”
GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich accused Republicans of overreaching with their plan to change Medicare to a premium-support program. “I’m against Obamacare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change,” Gingrich said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He added: “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.” But Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the author of the GOP budget blueprint, defended the Medicare plan on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We have got to reform this program for the next generation if we’re going to save it for the next generation,” Ryan said.
“The reason people were covering Trump so much was because he had an ‘It’ factor (sure, a Stephen King’s ‘It’ factor, mainly concentrated in his hair, but an ‘It’ factor nonetheless) that no one else has shown,” wrote Washington Post blogger Alexandra Petri. “Yes, others have flashes of it, from time to time. But if people found Jon Huntsman or even Michele Bachmann as uniformly, oddly compelling as Trump, they’d be covering them already.” Petri added: “Maybe this is a sad statement about our culture, and our capacity for distinguishing What Is Important from What Is Impressive. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Trump was the ice cream we didn’t know we were allowed to have for breakfast. Now we’re back to cereal, and it’s worse than before.”
Mitt Romney is getting hammered for how the Massachusetts health care plan, with its individual mandate, was a model for Obamacare. But columnist Kathleen Parker agreed with some of the defense Romney made last week. “Romney’s central point was that what’s good for one state may not suit another and that states should have the freedom to choose what works best for them rather than have to conform to a federal one-size-fits-all plan, the ultimate costs of which are not really knowable,” Parker wrote. “Whether one likes or dislikes Obama’s health care plan — and there certainly are parts to like — this has always been the crucial point. Keep it small, keep it simple, leave it to the states. Within that framework, what Romney did in Massachusetts is entirely defensible. It was an experiment, it was bold, it was imperfect.”
