… here is how they should be doing it.

Mitt Romney devoted an entire article [$] in today’s Wall Street Journal to explaining how the law he signed as governor of Massachusetts is very different from Hillary Clinton’s new health plan. 

He’s right, you know. Clinton proposes an individual mandate and an employer mandate. Romney? His Massachusetts law imposed … well, individual and employer mandates. Clinton proposes subsidies for those who can’t afford insurance. Romney? Yeah, he had those too. Clinton proposes expanding an existing government purchasing cooperative. Aha! Romney … um, created a new government purchasing cooperative. Clinton wants to impose hidden taxes on the young and those who lead healthy lifestyles to subsidize older people and those who lead unhealthy lifestyles. Romney? Yeah, he did that too. Clinton disingenously wraps her plan in free-market rhetoric. Romney … umm …

The governor doth protest too much, methinks.

In related news … the Romney campaign plans to roll out a new TV ad that warns:

When Republicans act like Democrats, America loses. It’s time for Republicans to start acting like Republicans.

Here’s a scary thought. What if Republicans are acting like Republicans?

According to CTV​.ca:

Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, who is battling breast cancer, travelled to California last June for an operation that was recommended as part of her treatment, says a report.

Stronach’s spokesman, Greg MacEachern, told the Toronto Star that the MP for Newmarket-Aurora had a “later-stage” operation in the U.S. after a Toronto doctor referred her.

“Belinda had one of her later-stage operations in California, after referral from her personal physicians in Toronto. Prior to this, Belinda had surgery and treatment in Toronto, and continues to receive follow-up treatment there,” said MacEachern.

He said speed was not the reason why she went to California.

Instead, MacEachern said the decision was made because the U.S. hospital was the best place to have it done due to the type of surgery required…

Stronach, who announced last April she would be leaving politics before the next election, paid for the surgery in the U.S., reports the Star…

While it is rare for MPs to seek treatment outside Canada, MacEachern said Stronach was not lacking confidence in the system.

“In fact, Belinda thinks very highly of the Canadian health-care system, and uses it when needed for herself and her children, as do all Canadians…” MacEachern told the Star.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Canada’s Medicare system.

Best of luck to Ms. Stronach and her family.

H.T. David Hyman.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has denounced Hillary Clinton’s health care plan for being a European-style socialized medicine plan” of “government managed insurance.”

Hmmmm.… HillaryCare 2.0 calls for an individual mandate to purchase health insurance, a collectivized insurance pool, huge subsidies for low- and middle-income families, and new regulation of the insurance industry. Why, that sounds like…the plan Governor Romney signed into law in Massachusetts.

Maybe that’s a bit strong. Let’s just say, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton operates with reckless disregard for individual freedom and the limited government that protects and sustains it.

In her latest salvo, she dismisses the great promises of the Declaration of Independence, the founding principles of the United States, as rhetorical flourishes, mere garnishes on the real stuff of life. “We can talk all we want about freedom and opportunity, about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what does all that mean to a mother or father who can’t take a sick child to the doctor?” she asked.

In her senatorial activities and her presidential campaign, Clinton has tended to propose modest, moderate programs. Even her new health care proposal is being hailed as more modest than her 1993 plan (though it would in fact impose a new government mandate on every person in the United States). But at her core, Hillary Clinton rejects the fundamental values of liberalism, values like individual autonomy, individual rights, pluralism, choice, and yes, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She seems to see no area of life that should be free from the heavy hand of government. And to her the world of free people seems a vast nothingness. When a few Republicans proposed to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, which spends about $125 million of the $63 billion spent on arts in the United States, she declaimed that such a move “not only threatens irrevocable damage to our cultural institutions but also to our sense of ourselves and what we stand for as a people.”

After her first attempt at nationalizing and bureaucratizing American health care, she told the New York Times that her next project would be “redefining who we are as human beings in the post-modern age.” I’d say 300 million Americans can do that for themselves.

Her hostility to freedom is not just a left-wing attitude. In the Senate, she’s been adding the paternalistic agenda of the religious right to her old-fashioned liberal paternalism. Clinton has called for federal legislation to prohibit the sale of “inappropriate” video games to children and teens. She’s introduced a bill to study the impact of media on children, a likely prelude to restrictions on television content, and she touts the V‑Chip regulation that President Bill Clinton signed. She supports federal legislation to outlaw flag desecration (though not a constitutional amendment).

In her book It Takes a Village, she insisted that 300 million free people could somehow come to “a consensus of values and a common vision of what we can do today, individually and collectively, to build strong families and communities.” She told Newsweek, “There is no such thing as other people’s children,” a claim that ought to frighten any parent. She promised to inflict on free citizens government videos running constantly in every gathering place, telling people “how to burp an infant, what to do when soap gets in his eyes, how to make a baby with an earache comfortable”—all the things that no one knew how to do until the federal government came along.

Hillary Clinton is no socialist. But when she makes her rejection of liberal values as explicit as she did on Monday – dismissing “freedom and opportunity [and] life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as irrelevant to people’s real lives–she is far too reminiscent of some of the most authoritarian figures of the 20^th century. Lenin, for instance, wrote, “Bourgeois democracy is democracy of pompous phrases, solemn words, exuberant promises and the high-sounding slogans of freedom and equality.”

And maybe it’s no surprise that Clinton cosponsored her videogame ban with Sen. Rick Santorum, who is also an articulate and determined opponent of individualism. In his book It Takes a Family and in various media appearances, he denounced “this whole idea of personal autonomy.” At least once he rejected “the pursuit of happiness” explicitly, saying, “This is the mantra of the left: I have a right to do what I want to do” and “We have a whole culture that is focused on immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness … and it is harming America.” Not the mantra of the Hillary Clinton left, obviously.

We know that societies that reject bourgeois freedom – the freedom of individualism, civil society, the rule of law, and yes, you guessed it, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – in favor of collectivism and economic goods end up with neither freedom nor prosperity. The United States has the most advanced medical care in the world — The rate of death from heart disease in the U.S. was cut in half between 1980 and 2000, for instance – because we have a mostly free and capitalist economy. Mandates and regulations make medical care more costly than it needs to be, and Hillary Clinton now proposes to pile on yet more mandates and regulations. But the really scary prospect of another Clinton presidency is not what she would do to our medical care but what she would do to the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that is the foundation of our free society.

Neither appears to have been persuaded by the principles of the Anti-Universal Coverage Club. Here’s my short take on HillaryCare II. And according to USA Today:

Clinton unveiled her plan as Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said President Bush wants to achieve universal health care before he leaves office.

Leavitt told the USA TODAY editorial board that Bush will veto a Democratic plan emerging from Congress that would add $35 billion in taxpayer subsidies to the Children’s Health Insurance Program over five years. In doing so, Leavitt said, Bush will urge Congress to join him in seeking coverage for all Americans.

“He’d like to see the larger debate begin,” Leavitt said. “The very best opportunity we have may well be in the next 15 months.”

Maybe Dubya will steal the issue from Democrats, much like he stole Medicare prescription drugs. Heck, with Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled a sweeping health care proposal Monday that would require everyone to carry health insurance and offer federal subsidies to help reduce the cost of coverage. Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner responds: “Here we go again. HillaryCare is back, and its apparent that Sen. Clinton has learned little since the American people overwhelmingly rejected her last attempt to overhaul the U.S. health care system. Once again her plan, which would cost $110 billion per year in new taxes, calls for greater government control over American health care. If her plan were to pass this time, it would mean higher taxes, lost jobs, less patient choice, and poorer quality health care.”

• Michael D. Tanner’s full statement
• Son of HillaryCare, featuring Michael D. Tanner, 09/17/2007 (MP3)
• “Hazards of the Individual Health Care Mandate,” by Glen Whitman