... Going to the emergency room when you’re very sick is no substitute for regular care, especially if you have chronic health problems. When such problems are left untreated — as they often are among uninsured Americans — a trip to the emergency room can all too easily come too late to save a life.So the reality, to which Mr. Romney is somehow blind, is that many people in America really do die every year because they don’t have health insurance.
How many deaths are we talking about? That’s not an easy question to answer, and conservatives love to cite the handful of studies that fail to find clear evidence that insurance saves lives. The overwhelming evidence, however, is that insurance is indeed a lifesaver, and lack of insurance a killer. For example, states that expand their Medicaid coverage, and hence provide health insurance to more people, consistently show a significant drop in mortality compared with neighboring states that don’t expand coverage.
And surely the fact that the United States is the only major advanced nation without some form of universal health care is at least part of the reason life expectancy is much lower in America than in Canada or Western Europe. ...Paul Krugman, NYT
The ability and the willingness of the right to simply ignore history, fact, or anything that gets in the way of their ideology is appalling. I was reading Paul Krugman's piece in the Times this morning even as Nicholas Lemann's profile of Mitt Romney was still resonating. Reading it, one begins to understand how religion -- how Mormonism -- does work against democracy. In fact, it may be the most potent destructive element democracy has. As a Mormon, Romney was brought up to believe that business -- building and making money -- was the -- the! -- one true path to truth. Within that believe is, of course, a growing belief in one's own infallibility. Doubt? Compromise? Allowing for other considerations? No way.
One could see Romney simply as a rich person who thinks the way many rich people must think; one could see him as a super fund-raiser who is good at telling a certain kind of wealthy audience what he believes it wants to hear; or one could see him simply as somebody who can’t connect to outsiders in any natural way, who goes through life trying one somewhat forced and awkward technique after another, because he thinks he has to keep his real self private. It isn’t easy to comprehend what sort of heart and soul and mind produced those remarks. Romney is very deeply a product of a series of interconnected, tightly enclosed worlds, with their own rules: Mormonism, business school, management consulting, private equity. Understanding him requires understanding the subcultures that produced him. ...Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker
The private equity of the Romney brand is pretty cold stuff. It bypasses, even excludes, people and reality and looks only at "efficiency."
Even as Bain Capital was making a lot of its money in buyouts, it still took pride in its consulting skills. Romney likes to say that he was a consultant or a venture capitalist, not that he was in private equity. Consultants think that people in private equity make most of their money from the way a deal is structured (Bain Capital aggressively pursued that aspect of its business), not from how well they analyze a company and its problems. Some Bainies liked to talk about “the nuclear reactor”: their all-powerful analytic methods, which the dummies on Wall Street didn’t have. They weren’t traders; they were efficiency experts. What they did wasn’t mere “financial engineering”; it was “operational engineering.” They replaced management, reorganized the supply chain, upgraded equipment, changed the accounting system. Romney loved to order up charts and graphs; in his personal pantheon of admirability “data” ranks right up there with “leadership.” During meetings, he still challenges the person making the PowerPoint presentation, poking holes in the argument, demanding different ways to solve the problem. In his own mind, he is a master chief executive who started a very successful business that brought a particular approach to problems—not a guy who used debt to buy and resell businesses. ...Lemann, New Yorker
Romney really doesn't like the idea of being seen as a killer of businesses and their employees, but rather a brilliant (which evidently Romney was) analyst and manager of stuff and the things that keep that stuff going. In many ways, from his looks and clothing to the way he thinks, Romney is straight out of 1950's novel about a man in a grey flannel suit.
We Americans have flirted with that hard, cold culture more than once. And we've rebelled against it at times.
Three years after Bain Capital was founded, Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street” came out. Gordon Gekko, its protagonist, expressed his greed by doing buyout deals. A few years later, in “Pretty Woman,” Richard Gere was a private-equity guy who redeemed himself by falling in love with Julia Roberts and cancelling his plans to buy a company and do all the things that private-equity firms do. In popular culture, private equity had become the most conveniently available symbol of everything that people didn’t like about the transactional economy. In 1994, when Romney ran for the U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy, Kennedy’s campaign figured out (as President Obama’s campaign has this year) that an essential element of a race against Romney was to run against the private-equity business.
Within private equity, people don’t talk about the questions that are on the mind of the public. One professor at a leading business school whose subject is private equity put it simply: “Can I change the free cash-flow equation of the company? If I do, I win. If I don’t, I lose. It’s not the job of private equity to create jobs. The job is to create value. That sometimes creates jobs, and sometimes not.” ...Lemann, New Yorker
What is so damned odd about all this is that this culture -- this embrace of job destruction, this "transactional economy" -- is what brought us to our knees at the end of the Bush administration. It's what produced the financial crash, the deep recession. You'd think we'd learn!
November 6th is our final exam day. The results will tell us whether we learned or whether we're headed straight back into that transactional economy in which most of us lose in the transaction. You can see why a candidate like Mitt Romney tries hard to distance himself from "private equity."
...Let’s be brutally honest here. The Romney-Ryan position on health care is that many millions of Americans must be denied health insurance, and millions more deprived of the security Medicare now provides, in order to save money. At the same time, of course, Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan are proposing trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy. So a literal description of their plan is that they want to expose many Americans to financial insecurity, and let some of them die, so that a handful of already wealthy people can have a higher after-tax income.It’s not a pretty picture — and you can see why Mr. Romney chooses not to see it....Paul Krugman, NYT
