NHDP should be ashamed

by: hannah

Mon Apr 11, 2011 at 10:39:27 AM EDT

Dear Friend,

Tomorrow is a historic day - the 5th Anniversary of Mitt Romney signing his Massachusetts health care reform plan into law.

Five years ago, Mitt Romney laid the foundation for President Obama's Affordable Care Act. Without Romney, it's hard to see how President Obama would have been able to provide quality, affordable health care for every American.

Take a second today or tomorrow to thank Mitt Romney for providing the critical momentum necessary to get President Obama's vision of health reform through Congress and signed into law.   Click here to tweet Mitt Romney and thank him.

Nationally, for more than 100 years, Americans and their elected leaders had debated how to reform a system that left too many people without care because of lack of access, soaring costs or unfair and discriminatory insurance regulations. It's hard to believe that it was only five years ago that then Governor Romney stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Senator Kennedy to sign Massachusetts' historic health care reform law.

It claims to be from the New Hampshire Democratic Party.

This missive is full of logical error.  There are a number of gross mis-attributions of agency.  That is, persons are credited with having done things they didn't do.  President Obama DID NOT and WILL NOT "provide...health care" to anyone, must less every American.  What he did was sign legislation which sets standards of service for health insurance companies (which don't provide care, either) and directs them to make payments to providers on behalf of their clients -- directives which have almost no enforcement mechanism attached.  

Since health insurance companies are chartered by states, their failure to follow directives can, at best, be responded to by state insurance commissioners withdrawing their operating licenses, which may or may not affect their enterprise, depending on whether or not people stop sending them money.  You'll recall that unlicensed stock brokers are able to conduct business for a good long while until they are stopped and punished.

President Obama neither had nor has a vision of health reform.  Nor did Mitt Romney provide any momentum to the Congress.  Perhaps, if he'd been elected President, Romney could be credited with momentum, but, since he wasn't, we won't ever know.  Not to mention that Romney has since disavowed support for health insurance industry reform.  And it's not because he recognizes that the health insurance industry is a useless middleman which contributes no added value to patient care.

If there is a vision for health reform in the White House, it belongs to Michelle Obama, whose efforts in the area of nutrition are constantly under attack because industrialized agriculture does not consider nutritious food a profit center.

A missive from the Democratic party crediting a Republican with reforming something that wasn't reformed (health care) is both disingenuous and deceptive.  For shame.

Finally, it's hard to believe this missive is addressed to Democrats.  Democrats do not elect "leaders."  Democrats select public servants. Not to mention that legislators, not executives are responsible for drafting laws and providing stewardship for our public assets.

What are the people tasked with managing the New Hampshire Democratic Party thinking when they pimp a Republican to increase traffic to twitter, a private social networking site that sells membership information to make money? Is the NHDP so hard up?
Again, for shame.