RomneyScare

As a candidate for the presidency, Mitt Romney has a number of things going for him. He’s rich, handsome, and has a funny first name.

Perhaps more importantly, he’s neither Donald Trump nor Newt Gingrich.

But still, he does have a niggly problem: His experience. He was the Massachusetts governor who signed a medical care reform law that provided the blueprint for the Democrats’ national version, now known (un)popularly as “ObamaCare.”

One of the best reasons to vote “Republican” next year would be to oust the politician who gave us such a bad bill. But, on matters of “health care,” Romney comes off as nothing less than the generic knock-​off of Obama. 

The Wall Street Journal recently published a critique of Romney’s Massachusetts fix, highlighting its “technocratic” (decidedly not “market-​based”) nature, individual mandate, and consequent necessary government mandate to subsidize the uninsurable. Plus, of course, its spectacular lack of cost containment. 

The one thing in the reform’s favor is that the ranks of those covered by medical insurance has grown. 

But that the state’s pre-​reform, utility-​like regulation of the insurance industry had priced so many out of the market? That somehow doesn’t get addressed — most certainly not by the program’s defenders or by Romney himself. Or many others. Pity.

Mitt gave a major speech last night, defending his “RomneyCare,” saying that his position “is not going to satisfy everybody.”

How can it satisfy anyone but big-​government partisans?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.