Newt Gingrich Backed Romney Health Care Plan and Provides Confirmation Romney Wanted it for the Nation

Not That This Matters – Republican Voters Appear to be Beyond Requiring the Truth

The biggest issue with respect to Mitt Romney’s ascension to the Republican nomination has been his health care plan that he instituted in Massachusetts.  Recognizing that allowing persons to go without health care insurance resulted in higher costs for everyone else, and that health care insurance reform could not take place without everyone having health insurance, Mr. Romney championed a law requiring individuals in Massachusetts to have health insurance.

This does not sit well with Republicans, who put the freedom to not have health care coverage above the freedom to have affordable health care.  So Mr. Romney has taken the unsupportable position that this rule was ok for Massachusetts, but was not necessarily right for the rest of the nation.  This comes even though Mr. Romney touted his plan as a model for the nation earlier, that position now being politically inconvenient and so like other inconvenient positions Mr. Romney has held, he simply changed his position.

The good part of the Wall Street Journal, that is the investigative reporting part, has found a newsletter authored by Newt Gingrich which confirms that the Massachusetts model was to be the model for the nation.  But first of all note that Mr. Gingrich praised the Romney plan.

Newt Gingrich voiced enthusiasm for Mitt Romney's Massachusetts health-care law when it was passed five years ago, the same plan he has been denouncing over the past few months as he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination.

"The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system," said an April 2006 newsletter published by Mr. Gingrich's former consulting company, the Center for Health Transformation.

Now Mr. Gingrich obviously finds these words to be a problem in his current campaign, and so they have been taken down from the web.  Note to Newt:  Do you really think your past statements disappear when they are not longer convenient?

But the important thing here is how Newt characterized the Romney plan as a goal for the rest of America, 100% insurance coverage.

The two-page "Newt Notes" analysis, found online by The Wall Street Journal even though it no longer appears on the center's website, continued: "We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans."

Now Mr. Romney’s credibility would be greatly enhanced if he could produce a statement made at that time disputing Mr. Gingrich’s interpretation of the Romney plan.  Because if the plan was was part of a goal to have 100% insurance coverage for all Americans that could only happen if the rest of America has the requirement for health insurance, or in short, the health care plan of Mr. Obama.  Of course, no such thing happened.

Mr. Gingrich’s credibility would be enhanced if he hadn’t recently denounced Mr. Romney’s plan.

Mr. Gingrich's rise to the top of the field has come in part from his bashing Mr. Romney for engineering a state health-care expansion that became a model for President Barack Obama's 2010 health law. "Your plan essentially is one more big-government, bureaucratic, high-cost system," Mr. Gingrich told Mr. Romney during an October debate in Las Vegas. He said Mr. Romney was trying to solve Massachusetts' health-care problems "from the top down."

But Mr. Gingrich does have a defense.

Mr. Hammond said the Newt Notes essay wasn't written by Mr. Gingrich himself.

meaning maybe his dog did it and signed Newt’s name, that sort of thing probably having happened before.  Of course this that contradicts Newt's claim not to have written what Newt says he wrote,

The 2006 essays aren't signed, but the Center for Health Transformation's inaugural newsletter said the updates would be "periodically sent to members of the [center] from Newt, providing an insider's view of key events and opportunities for transformation."

the term “contradicts” being a nice way of saying that either it is a lie that Newt didn’t write the newsletter or it was a lie in 2006 when the Center for Health Transformation said the comments would come from Newt.  Take your pick.

Here is the full newsletter issue, courtesy of Brad DeLong's wonderful web site.  Sure sounds like Mr. Gingrich was trying to take credit for writing it, but then that's what charlatans do.

Ok, there will be diehards out there who still believe that this is all a huge conspiracy, that Newt Gingrich really opposed an insurance mandate and that all the words he supposedly wrote in favor of it were by others designed to bring down Newt.  So here a video tape, thanks to Taegan Goddard

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/12/27/gingrich_defended_individual_mandate.html

Oops, wait a minute, diehard Newt supporter will say that is a Newt imposter, (but they will admit, a very good one).

At the end of the day of course none of this matters.  Republican voters have long since given up any requirement that their candidates be consistent or logical or even take defensible positions.  Unfortunately though, the nation seems to be also moving in that direction.