Apparently Republican Presidential Loser Mitt Romney now feels that everything would be better if he could just Turn Back Time when it comes to ObamaCare and the 2012 Election.
Really? Is that what the problem was with your Campaign? Tell me more.
Please, Governor... go on.
"I don't know. I wish I could go back and turn back the clock and take another try," he said on "Fox News Sunday" when asked if he felt he would have won the 2012 election if President Obama had not lied about Americans being able to keep their health insurance plans.
"But history is in the past, and I'm not going to worry about what could have happened. What I am worried about, is that you have a lot of people who are going to find their premiums going through the roof," he said. "They're going to find that the doctor they've had, they can't keep. They're going to find the policies they were promised they could have, they're not going to be able to keep. And the American people are going to be very, very upset about that."
But wait, isn't this now January 5th of 2014? Aren't all those Rate Hikes and plan Cancellations and "Losing your Doctor" stuff supposed to have already happened, like, Four Days Ago? When exactly does he think all of this is "going to" take place?
Will it be when Gallifrey is finally found?
[Note if you are not a Doctor Who fan, and/or have not yet seen The Time of the Doctor Christmas Special, you may need to bone up before reading further]
Before I get into this let me just say that I'm glad that Romney was gracious enough to accept Melissa Harris-Perry's apology over last weeks remarks over the adoption of his grandson Keiran. Good. Fine. Glad that Nontroversy is over.
The sad part is that it may be largely because of her faux pau, that Romney has dained to escape the clutches of his dread car elevator and blight the rest of us with his...wisdom.
I've had my doubts about Romney's competency and cognitive abilities for a long, long time. Specifically when he said, during a 2008 Campaign Debate that "If only Saddam Hussein had Let the U.N. Inspectors back into Iraq, there wouldn't have needed to have been a War".
“[If] Saddam Hussein had opened up his country to IAEA inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein, therefore, not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn’t be in the conflict we’re in.”
“But he didn’t do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in.”
Yeah, uh, No - that didn't happen.
Here, let me just Turn Back the Clock Ten Years with a bit of the 'ole Timey Wimey.
The IAEA’s Director General, Mohamed ElBaradei, and UNMOVIC’s Executive Chairman, Hans Blix, both reported progress, following the return of UN inspectors to Iraq in November 2002, in resolving critical questions about the current status of Iraq’s WMD programs.
Based on more than a hundred visits to suspect sites and private interviews with a number of individual scientists known to have been involved with WMD programs in the past, ElBaradei stated that the IAEA had “to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq” and predicted that the agency should be able to provide that Security Council with an objective and thorough assessment of Iraq’s nuclear related capabilities “in the near future.”
Following General Powell's presentation to the UN, the Security Council Unanimously Voted in
Resolution 1441 which compelled Iraq to disclose it's WMD status and allow Inspectors back into the Country.
Which THEY DID, including a Full Declaration
PDF - as required by UNRes1441 of their WMD Status, which truthfully stated that they
didn't have any anymore. As shown above the Inspectors did return in November of 2002 and were in Country doing their job for the next few months - during which they found and destroyed a few missiles that were out-of-spec, but otherwise nothing. Generally speaking this should have been good news, but that's not how the Bush Administration took it.
The Bush administration’s response to the inspectors’ reports was swift and negative, because their conclusions contradicted the allegations previously made by the U.S. government – for example, with regard to the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD. The next day, President George W. Bush delivered a radio address to the American people, arguing that the inspection teams did not need any more time, because Saddam was “still refusing to disarm.”
Given Saddam Hussein’s “long history of reckless aggression and terrible crimes,” the United States needed to be willing to use military force rather than waiting “to see what [he] would do with weapons of mass destruction.”
I've always said that if Bush hadn't jumped the gun and had the let the inspectors finish their job, the way that
Charles Duelfer eventually did [finding as Habbush had already told us, that Iraq had
destroyed it's WMD Stockpiles in 1991], then Saddam would have lost his greatest deterrent against the restless Kurds in the North and the Shia in the South and would have likely ended up in the same situation that Qaddafi did, without us putting any boots on the ground what-so-ever.
And just what did the Inspectors, who were in fact still on the ground in Iraq in February of 2003 think of U.S. Intelligence that they were provided on WMD's?
The inspector said: "It took a long time for the US to hand over intelligence in the first place and when they did it has proved to be highly inaccurate. . . . "Frankly, we have better things to do than run around the country chasing bogus so-called evidence."
US spy chiefs were branded "time wasters " yesterday after weapons inspectors rubbished their evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Angry and frustrated at being given vague or wrong information, a senior member of the UN team said they had been fed "garbage after garbage after garbage".
Garbage after garbage. Yeah, that pretty much describes how and why we ended up in the Iraq War, the Bush Administration simply refused to believe Good News when they heard it from the UN inspectors, from the State Dept, from the Energy Dept, from former Iraq Intelligence director Habbush and from Joe Wilson which pretty much matches Mitt Romney's upside-down and backwards view of the Affordable Care Act now.
Romney claims, apparently due to his close personally ties to the Time Vortex and it's close pal the Infinite Schism that very soon now, someday, Health Care Rates are going to Skyrocket!
Except that this is already the future, it's now 2014, and the latest report on the rate of Health care costs came out last Monday.
The agency responsible for implementing ObamaCare will release a report on Monday showing slow growth in national healthcare spending.
The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) will brief reporters at the National Press Club on what the Obama administration has touted as a trend of slower healthcare spending growth since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
The November report said healthcare spending between 2010 and 2013 grew at an annual rate of 1.3 percent. That’s the lowest rate dating back to 1965, when the metric was first calculated.
Now, the report does fairly note that Healthcare spending is likely to begin increasing this year, as [about
10 Million and counting] more people are being covered than before, but much of that spending comes from the expansion of Medicaid and Exchange Subsidies so the report does not predict the kind of per capita premium spikes that Romney suggests. In fact, since the ACA has a cap on yearly out-of-pocket costs per recipient, what Romney suggests isn't really even possible except for those with super-low premium high deductible plans, which are now only available to people under the age of 30. [Or possibly 35, I'll have to check on that]
Romney also said that people wouldn't be able to "Keep their Doctors or Policies" and even though this created a huge stir at the end of 2013 when Insurers starting sending out Cancellation Notices to Policies that should have been granted GrandFather Status under the ACA it appears that the actual number of people who may have still lost their old policies following Obama's Fix - is about 10,000.
Obamacare’s detractors have argued that millions of Americans will lose their health coverage due to the changes introduced by Obamacare. But according to a new analysis, this ignores counterbalancing policies in the law. The report finds that less than 10,000 people will lose coverage coverage without an immediate and affordable replacement.
The paper, put together on behalf of ranking member Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and other the Democrats on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, takes as its starting point a recent Associated Press report that 4.7 million Americans will see their current coverage cancelled. Critics of Obamacare have used this and other reports to play conceptual games, allowing the technical “cancellation” of a plan to imply a consumer will lose all coverage entirely and be left out in the cold. But for the vast major that 4.7 million, the cancellation of a plan simply means a shift into a new and often better form of coverage.
Although it has been argued that Millions could have been recipients of such cancellation letters, it appears in fact that only a few thousand were actually sent out. Blue-Cross Blue-Shield, which is one of the largest insurers in the nation,
only sent out 2,000 of these letters and they anticipate that
all of their policy holders will be able to maintain their coverage, even if they have to shift to a new ACA-compliant plan.
Not to say that 10,000 people stuck in this jackpot is anything to scoff at or ignore. That sucks, but then it's not something that is entirely the fault of the ACA. There's also the fact that these "Cancellations" are something that were already occurring in the individual market and were simply a method that the Insurers use to modify and replace old plans with new ones. It unfortunately, happens all the time.
The fact is the plan “cancellations” were a regular occurrence on the individual market even before Obamacare, as customers saw plans changed or terminated and had to enroll in new ones. Studies have found that one third in the individual market left their coverage after only one year, and over 80 percent did not stay in their coverage longer than two years.
In the end, Romney's grasp on the reality and facts on the ground in relation to Obamacare is no better than his [or the Bush Administration's] grasp of the facts in relation to WMD or for that matter the entire Republican Parties grasp of the facts in regards to Benghazi, Climate Change, Sustainable Energy, Federal Nullification, valid grounds for Presidential Impeachment, the difference between Hate Speech and Free Speech and/or the scope and limits of legitimate Religious Freedom.
And not even a Quantum Etch-a-Sketch installed in a stolen Type 40 T.A.R.D.I.S. with a broken chameleon circuit or having Clary Oswald the Impossible Girl looping back through Mitt's own personal Time Stream swoop in at the last second to save his bacon, again and again and again, when all hope of survival has finally gone is going to fix and change that reality. Nope, no Regeneration Cycle Reboots for you Romney. You're Toast.
But thanks for popping back up again and reminding us all what a huge mini-van sized Bullet the Country Dodged back in 2012. Whew. That couldn't been worst than an full on Cyberman/Sontaran/Weeping Angels/Dalek Fleet attack on the 47% of us you still don't care about.
Vyan