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Romney's healthcare plan may be more revolutionary than Obama's


April 23, 2012|By Noam N. Levey, Washington Bureau
  • Republican candidate Mitt Romney says he would dump President Obama's healthcare overhaul and replace it with something else. Early outlines suggest it would dramatically change the way millions of Americans get health insurance and could leave many without it.
Republican candidate Mitt Romney says he would dump President Obama's… (Frederic J. Brown, AFP/Getty…)






"There are significant changes that should be made," said Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who is advising the Romney campaign.

Romney's plan follows a lead set by President George W. Bush, who unsuccessfully pushed for a healthcare overhaul. It adopts proposals long championed by conservative healthcare experts.

It also sharply contrasts with Romney's last foray into healthcare reform. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney successfully pushed a law that guaranteed coverage for all state residents and included a requirement that people buy insurance — an individual mandate similar to Obama's.

Romney moved away from that plan during the Republican primaries and has shown no signs of returning to it. Indeed, his emerging plan would make it all but impossible for any state to follow Massachusetts' example.

While offering consumers more choices, Romney's plan would give companies strong incentives to stop providing insurance to workers. It also would overhaul the 46-year-old Medicare and Medicaid programs for the elderly, poor and disabled.

The plan could swell the federal deficit; a similar plan backed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the 2008 presidential campaign would have cost more than $1 trillion over 10 years, on par with the price tag for the Obama healthcare law.

Romney now regularly criticizes Obama's healthcare law as government overreach and an attack on American free enterprise.

"It's easy to forget how often candidate Obama assured us under 'Obamacare,' nothing in our insurance plans would have to change," Romney said recently at the National Rifle Assn. annual meeting.



"This gets greater consumer choice so that people can buy what they want, not just what their employer wants to give them," Romney said last year while explaining his plan at the University of Michigan.






Supporters argue that with Medicare, as with insurance for working-age adults, free-market competition would lower costs. But the shift could force seniors to pay thousands of dollars more for their care, according to analyses of similar proposals by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

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