Ann Coulter's Shameful Romneycare Column, Demolished 140 Characters at a Time

  1. Loren Heal, who knows a bit about the health care debate, spent Wednesday evening digging into Ann Coulter's shameful column wherein she defended Romneycare as a perfectly wonderful creation that should in no way disqualify her favorite Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, from the nomination. His points are so well made, within the 140-character Twitter limit, that I thought it a good idea to collect them, so you can read them in sequence. The Mark Levin rebuttal to which he refers at the beginning is here.
  2. Wow. Finally waded throught the @AnnCoulter screed. Will listen to Levin's podcast in the morning. My initial thoughts ...
  3. That some people thought the individual mandate was a conservative idea doesn't make it one. Nor is loyalty to a bad idea a virtue.
  4. Romney continues to defend Romneycare under the same delusions he was under when signing it. Reality has mugged Massachusetts, but not him.
  5. Coulter suggests that Romneycare was a monument to conservatism before the MA Dems destroyed it, but it is not so. He signed their crap.
  6. As I've said before, the individual mandate doesn't ensure individual responsibility; sending someone a bill does that.
  7. The mandate to *buy insurance* is a mandate to collectivize the amortization of medical costs. We all absorb each other's costs.
  8. Mandated insurance is a collectivst mechanism. It distributes wealth from the healthy to the poor and sick.
  9. The instant a wise person realizes they are in error, they stop, correct, and learn. The fool continues to insist he was right.
  10. I've made errors and proudly insisted I was right. Doing it makes me feel small and stupid. Romney looks like he is feeling that.
  11. Coulter says, fallaciously: "No one is claiming that the Constitution gives each person an unalienable right not to buy insurance."
  12. First, the Constitution doesn't give anyone rights. We have them, and the Constitution protects them.
  13. I do claim that the Constitution protects my unalienable right not to buy insurance, or it is an unjust document that should be scrapped.
  14. If the Constitution doesn't protect my right not to be told what to do, it is worthless. Telling me what to buy is telling me what to do.
  15. Coulter says buying health insurance is just like buying a gun for the militia. No, it isn't. Defense of liberty why we have government.
  16. Amortizing the cost of health care is not the purpose of government, so a mandated purchase is outside government's purview.
  17. Coulter offers non sequiturs that government can tell us to do W, X, and Y, therefore it can tell us to do Z. But W, X, and Y are not Z.
  18. Vocabulary police: A non sequitur or red herring argument is a logical fallacy involving something unrelated to the question at hand.
  19. Another way in which mandating gun ownership is not the same as mandating health insurance is that a gun is real physical property.
  20. You can trade for a gun, or build one yourself. Once purchased, you can use it again and again. You need not keep buying it.
  21. Coulter also misses the point that Massachusetts requires federal subsidies for Romneycare to work.
  22. Coulter says opponents are conflating a Constitutional question with a policy one, implying that the mandate is good policy otherwise.
  23. But the mandate to buy insurance is *not* good policy. To function, markets need what I call a "null competitor": the ability to opt out.
  24. Without a null competitor, prices will inevitably rise. Government is then "forced" to step in and fix prices, as they are doing in MA now.
  25. It's not some big surprise that when everyone has to buy something, prices for it goes up. It's supply and demand.

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Jimmie

I write. I host a podcast. I sing. I love God, hockey, Blue Crabs baseball, and tabletop gaming. You can hire me to make your social media fly. www.sundriesshack.com www.deliveryshow.com

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