Freedom Line Blog

“But those political promises were only good for as long as it took to get the mandate enacted into law.”

That was the observation of “neither politically or socially conservative” author and Massachusetts resident Wendy Williams, commenting this weekend upon her first-hand experience under that state’s mandatory healthcare “reform.” Readers should be forewarned – Mrs. Williams’s commentary generates visceral anger at the sanctimonious bureaucrats who would wrench control over our own health and family budget decisions.  She describes how she and her husband rationally chose to purchase insurance through IBM, his former employer, only to be informed three years later that they’d be fined by the state because Massachusetts changed the rules to make their bare-bones catastrophic policy unpalatable.  Accordingly, they were told to either purchase a pricier policy that they didn’t want, or pay another $1,000 each year to Massachusetts. 

This directly contradicted the explicit promises of then-Governor Mitt Romney and then-Senator Ted Kennedy that middle-class residents would not find themselves taxed or otherwise penalized if state government healthcare reform was imposed.

Now, advocates of a federal healthcare mandate make the same promises to us.  As they say about those who fail to learn from history…