Mitt Romney unveils two-word health care plan for people who aren't healthy or insured: 'Tough luck'

"With a political base like I've got, what else did you expect me to say?" (Brian Snyder/Reuters) The father of Obamacare is promising to kill it ... and replace it with something else:

Addressing supporters in Orlando, Romney fiercely attacked what he and other Republicans have labeled 'Obamacare.' The presumptive GOP presidential nominee said that if the Supreme Court does not overturn the law in full, he would work to repeal whatever remains of it on his first day as president by granting a waiver to all 50 states to opt out of the law's restrictions. [...] 'It's not only bad policy and bad for middle-income families and bad for small business, it's simply unaffordable,' Romney said. 'And so, the right course for us is to make sure that the next president of the United States repeals Obamacare and replaces Obamacare.'

And what does he want to replace it with? In his words, something that would (a) "make sure that every American has access to good health care" and (b) "get health care to act more like a consumer market."

Well, that's exactly what Obamacare does. If you really want those things, you can't be for repealing it.

It not only makes sure every single American has access to good health insurance, it makes sure they can afford it. Under Obamacare, nobody will be denied health insurance because they can't afford it. If you repeal Obamacare, you'll repeal the subsidies that make insurance affordable and you'll repeal the requirement that insurers cover everybody, regardless of preexisting condition. In short, if you want to guarantee access to health care for all Americans, you need to support Obamacare.

Moreover, Obamacare is a market-based system. It creates state-based marketplaces for individuals who don't get insurance through their employer or through Medicare or Medicaid. It regulates those marketplaces to make sure every health care plan offers a basic level of services, but beyond that, it encourages competition among those plans.

By his own admission, Romney would replace Obamacare with a health care system that denied sick people access to health care. This is the kind of policy that Romney says he wants to replace Obamacare with:

Let's say someone has been continuously insured and they develop a serious condition, and let's say they lose their job or they change jobs, they move and they go to a new place. I don't want them to be denied insurance because they've got some preexisting condition.

Well, that was already the law before Obamacare, through COBRA. Obamacare goes a huge step further, however: It says that nobody can be denied health insurance coverage for any reason. Period. You don't need special paperwork or to be able to afford some insanely expensive transitional plan. You're qualified. Period. Under Romney's plan, if you didn't already have insurance through your employer, an insurer could cut you off for any reason whatsoever. And if you never had insurance, and you were deemed to be too big a risk, insurers wouldn't have to cover you.

To put it briefly, Mitt Romney's message to people with pre-existing conditions is just two words long: "Tough luck." It's what he said earlier this year, and it's what he's saying now. It's wrong, and he knows it, because Romney's finest achievement as governor was Romneycare, the model for Obamacare. But now, because he's a captive of the radical Right, he pretends as if Romneycare never existed. And beyond the policy he outlined today, that gives you a clear sense of what a Romney presidency would be like: constantly bending over backwards to placate his conservative base.