Mitt Romney certainly has his work cut out for him if he wants to be on the GOP ticket in 2012. Especially since RomneyCare is bankrupting Massachusetts, and Obama loves comparing his rotten health care plan to Romney’s health care plan. And this isn’t going to make Romney’s job any easier.
In a development that could have ramifications for the 2012 presidential race, Jon Kingsdale, the man who Mitt Romney appointed to help implement the Massachusetts health care plan, has stepped down. Though Kingsdale hasn’t announced where he’s moving to, a spokesman for his agency tells the Boston Globe that he will be “exploring opportunities to help with national health care reform.”
What does this all have to do with 2012?
Well, Kingsdale was appointed by the Romney administration in 2006, and tasked with running the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, which operates the state exchange on which Massachusetts citizens can use government subsidies to purchase government-designed insurance plans. This is the same basic infrastructure that Democrats just created at the national level, and Obama himself has repeatedly tied the two plans together in the past few weeks.
Obama may want to scale back his comparisons of Obamacare to the Massachusetts plan. You know, the plan that’s putting insurers out of business, or will be soon. If he keeps that up the folks might start wondering why he copied a failed policy.
As for the failed Massachusetts policy, it’s time for Romney to stop defending it. He certainly can argue that it was a state law and the federal government has no business nationalizing health care. But he also might want to be blunt and simply admit that he was the governor of a very liberal state, with a liberal legislature, and he was just playing the cards he was dealt while doing what the people of his state wanted, even though in the long run it hurt them.
I don’t know…2012 is a long way off. We have to get through the mid-terms this year. But if I had my druthers in 2012 we’ll see any combination of the following on the GOP ticket: Jim DeMint, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain. Nothing against Romney, but the fiasco in Massachusetts is a monkey on his back and unless he starts singing a different tune his primary opponents will have a field day with RomneyCare.
