No, am not tweeting the debate as I am trying to catch up on other things (like audio from the last two GrokTALK! shows). However, just before the debate started, I ran across the the RomneyCare story that was being discussed (food fighted?). It is simply awful:
Lauren and Nick Destito had a wonderful life in Plainville. They paid their bills and raised two sons in a lovely four-bedroom colonial that they were just eight years away from owning outright.
But the economy collapsed in 2008 and soon crushed the small tree and landscaping business the couple had run since 1984.
Now, the state of Massachusetts is grinding the Destitos into the dirt. The reason: the health insurance the Destitos bought, paid $750 monthly premiums on and repeatedly used at doctor visits apparently does not pass muster with the state’s mandatory universal health insurance law. Now the Destitos, both 50 and already on the brink of financial ruin, are facing a $3,000 state fine.
“The stress will kill me before anything else,” Lauren Destito joked nervously yesterday just before her appeal hearing with the state’s Health Connector. She was so worried she asked her state representative, Dan Winslow, to listen in on the conference call. With hearing officer Irene Herman’s knowledge, I listened in, too.
“I would just like to say that we did make the effort and purchased a plan,” Destito told Herman. “I don’t understand why we’re in this situation at all.”
Because, Herman explained, the state must establish if her family could afford other, better insurance, and that affordability is determined “not, unfortunately, from your perspective but from the state agency’s view.”
In other words, the state decides how much health insurance you can afford — not you.
After that stunner, Herman asked Destito detailed questions about her income and expenses right down to costs of clothing, heat, food, phones. She also said the state would need documentation on her mortgage and medical bill arrears as well as what her insurance does and does not covers.
And this is the problem with Romneycare – the STATE determines what you should pay and have, regardless of what YOU believe you want or need or wish to pay. Freedom? Not when a bureaucrat can rule "Hey, you can afford more! I don’t care what else is going on in your life – YOU NO LONGER GET TO DETERMINE THAT, I DO!".
Romney has been skating too long on the debating point that "RomneyCare not good for Feds, good for MA". In EITHER case, it is unconstitutional. No, Mitt is right in that it is not an enumerated power of the Federal Government and is in the purview of the States.
But that misses the point – it is philosophically and morally wrong to force a free sovereign person to purchase a service simply because they are breathing, be it by the Feds or the States. The reason for the enumerated powers was to keep the Federal government from taking away, not States rights, but Individual Liberty and Freedom. That is the Letter of the Constitution.
That does not mean that the States then get to violate those same Rights of an Individual just because they are supposed to be blockers of Federal overreach. That is abrogating the Spirit of the Constitution. And too few politicians, especially Democrat Socialists, never abide by that maxim.
Plain and simple, Romney led and participated in a State’s overreach that has resulted in the loss of that Freedom. And in this case, Mitt’s signature legislature has left a family already hard hit by Obama’s economic policies being harassed and harried by MA bureaucrats.
…A decision is expected in a month on the Destitos’ fine, which stems from 2010, when unemployment forced them to find cheaper insurance. That same year taxpayers paid $35.7 million in Massachusetts to cover free emergency room visits for illegal immigrants.
