Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Barbour Piles on Masscare

From The Hill

"Massachusetts has a state health insurance program that they're happy with. And that's their right," Barbour said in a hearing on healthcare reform before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

"We don't want that. That's not good for us," Barbour added. "We don't want community rating. We don't want extremely high mandatory standard benefits packages."

I want to make three observations here.

First is that Mississippi lags behind nearly every state in nearly every metric. I doubt that the rest of the country is holding its collective breath hoping that Mississippi can come along and solve all their problems.

Second is that Romney is going to be hit over the head on Masscare by everyone. I don't have a problem with what he did for Massachusetts, nor do I think he has anything to apologize for. It is just how it is that Romney will be facing down a firing squad from everyone on the right and from Obama as well in the next 18 months.

Third is that Barbour is either anticipating running, or doing dirty work here to help out some other candidate that he likes.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

According to Gallup, these are the rankings out of the 50 states for having the least uninsured:

Massachusetts 1
Arkansas 37
Alaska 38
Mississippi 48

zeke

ConMan said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
CraigS said...

LOL
Haley Barbour criticizes MassCare while Mississippi and Georgia and Alabama and Arkansas are in the bottom Quartile for healthcare including infant and children's health and even equity ; i.e., the gap between what the rich like Barbour can afford and what the poor can afford.
Great call Haley. Don't let any state get below you in quality health care

CraigS

ConMan said...

According to Gallup, these are the rankings out of the 50 states for having the least uninsured:

Massachusetts 1
Arkansas 37
Alaska 38
Mississippi 48

Anonymous said...

Ha, not much credibility for Barbour. So with him going after Mitt, does he consider Romney the man to beat?

Anonymous said...

The things that Barbour rips Masscare for were there Before Romnay was governor - community rating and excessive regulations of health care. If you read the Heritage report on Romney's actions, it is clear that he fought to reduce these health plan regulations.

hamaca said...

I love how the media sensationalizes comments made by one candidate about another.

"Barbour Rips Romney..." "Haley Barbour slams "RomneyCare".

Based on what was quoted in this post, I just don't see it. He commented that they don't want that in MS. So what?

I think that was Romney's whole point when he stated the concept could be a national model. Each state, such as MA, such as MS, get to decide for themselves, get to take action, get to decide to do nothing.

Bottom line, it's the states doing the deciding, one by one. MA had certain demographics that made the adoption of their plan more likely to be beneficial for a larger number of their residents.

MS doesn't have the demographics to do so. It'd fail miserably. They need an entirely different model. Maybe someone there will decide that no model is best.

Most importantly, the concept of states deciding what works best for them is something that should be the model for the nation--not the top-down concept being thrust on us by ObamaCare.

Doug NYC GOP said...

These HC attacks have not worked in the past 12 months. Obviously they are falling on deaf ears and people don't hold it against Romney. It's just something to say to get headlines.

I say let them all get it out of their systems now, because pretty soon, they'll have to articulate whay THEY will do solve the nation's problems. Just being against something only gets you so far.

Revolution 2012 said...

I'm beginning to wonder if Barbour is quickly becoming the Republicans Joe Biden?

This, The MLK comment, Him praising Obama the other day,.....