Huckabee Rips Romneycare
Politico reports:
In his new book, Mike Huckabee trashes “RomneyCare” – saying it’s “socialized medicine” that has exploded costs, worsened care for patients, and proves why President Obama’s unpopular health care reform won't work.
In a chapter in "A Simple Government," Huckabee uses Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care program to bolster his arguments against Obama's reforms, yoking the two tightly together.
"If our goal in health-care reform is better care at lower cost, then we should take a lesson from RomneyCare, which shows that socialized medicine does not work," he writes.In an interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday night, Huckabee called RomneyCare the "800 pound gorilla in the room for him."
"I think it's not a killer for him. But he has to say either 'I love it,' 'I hate it,' or, 'Hey I tried it, it didn't work and that's why I would say to you, let's not do it nationally,'" Huckabees said. "He's got to figure out how he wants to deal with it. It's the 800-pound elephant in the room for him."
Huckabee said in the interview that Romney should just fess up and admit his health care program's not working.
"The position he should take is to say: 'Look, the reason Obamacare won't work is because we've tried it at the state level and we know it won't work,'" Huckabee told AP.
"'We gave it our best shot and I'm proud we tried it because – in a world where we all agreed something needed to be done – we thought this might be a way to fix the crisis we had in health care. Our experiment did not turn out as we had hoped. It cost more, waiting times were higher, quality of care went down, people were greatly dissatisfied and it ended up having almost the polar opposite effect of what was intended.'"
In the book, Huckabee spends two pages detailing studies that have shown RomneyCare has failed, and calling it a clear precursor to the ways the national law also will not work.
Romney has tried to argue that his law is different than Obama’s and what works in one state won’t necessarily work in others or nationally, but the former Massachusetts governor has still come under sharp criticism.
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