weekly response

Who Cares About Obamacare Versus Romneycare?
By Jamal Jefferson

During a recent Republican primary debate in Jacksonville, Florida, Senator Rick Santorum questioned Governor Mitt Romney's electability. Governor Romney, who was the probable nominee at the time (Senator Santorum has won three of the five primaries since), continues to defend his involvement in Massachusetts’s Health Care Insurance Reform, which he engineered while serving as governor of Massachusetts. The issue at hand is that the Massachusetts law is similar in its framework to President Barack Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Senator Santorum called this a "fundamental issue" that Republicans could not tolerate. The "fundamental issue" is that both the Massachusetts law and the new federal law require individuals to purchase health insurance.

The individual mandate is a feature that is considered by many to be anathema to conservative philosophy. Governor Romney, if he wins the Republican nomination, will have to answer tough questions in the general election as he defends why he would repeal the PPACA when Obama himself claims that Romney's reform was the model for the national bill. In a heated quarrel, Santorum said, "I read an article today [and it] has 15 different items directly in common with Obamacare." Unfortunately, it has been difficult to locate this article.

Nevertheless, I have come across several websites that stack up Obamacare vs. Romneycare. Some of the same issues raised during the passage of PPACA bill appear. Yet some of these points were, and still are, irrelevant.

The national healthcare law is over 2,000 pages long, while the Massachusetts bill is only 70 pages. This is a fact that cannot be disputed, but it does not come as a surprise. As the national bill pertains to all 50 states and not just one, it makes sense that the bill is more complicated, and it follows logically that lawmakers needed more trees to create the bill. PPACA was about 1,000 pages in its genesis, but doubled to a little over 2,000 as lawmakers made amendments in efforts to make sure that the bill appeased both sides of the aisle.

Such length is not unusual for national legislation. Major spending bills frequently run more than 1,000 pages. According to Slate Magazine, "[the 2009] stimulus bill was 1,100 pages. The climate bill that the House passed in June [of 2009] was 1,200 pages. Bill Clinton's 1993 health care plan was famously 1,342 pages long. In 2007, President Bush's [budget bill] ran to 1,482 pages."

Furthermore, if you actually read the bill, or any bill, you will notice that not every page is filled like a textbook, or even an essay with 12 point font and one inch margins. Page numbers can be misleading because of these assumptions. In fact, if you take a look at the number of actual words, the bill is as long as a Harry Potter book (counting substantive language), though probably not as gripping, entertaining and comprehensible if you haven't attended law school.

A shallow comparison of these two separate bills allows us to say that they are indeed different, but nothing definitive about the content. However, in the following weeks I will examine the substantive differences between Obamacare and Romneycare. In the mean time, check out Governor Romeny's plan to repeal and replace PPACA that he presented last May in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Jamal Jefferson works as an aide to a radiologist in Cincinatti, Ohio. He graduated from Williams College in 2011 with a major in Biology. Jamal posts regularly as part of an ongoing "Guest Blogger" series. If you're interested in writing, do click the link and be in touch!