Why RomneyCare is worth supporting

As he gears up for a likely White House bid, Mitt Romney isn't exactly defending the health care reforms he enacted as governor of Massachusetts, says Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic. And that's too bad: When Republican rivals pummel his plan, a model of sorts for the reviled-on-the-right ObamaCare, someone should remind people that RomneyCare has actually been a success. The proportion of Massachusetts residents without health care coverage is now the lowest of any state. And while some people may still be struggling with high medical costs, "the overall picture looks encouraging." Here, an excerpt:

Perhaps the best testimonial for the Romney plan comes from its most recent critic. That would be Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who on Tuesday told a congressional committee that his state wanted nothing to do with Massachusetts-style reforms. "We don't want community rating. We don't want extremely high mandatory standard benefits packages."

Community rating, of course, is the practice of charging the same premium to different customers, even the diabetics and cancer survivors. “Extremely high mandatory standard benefits packages” in this particular case means insurance plans that cover what most of us would define as basic care, without gaps and loopholes that force the chronically and severely ill to pay exorbitant bills.

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Insurance available to all. Benefits that include the services sick people need. Yeah, why would anybody want that?

Read the entire article in The New Republic.