Can Romney Defend His Plan?

Over at the Atlantic, Marc Ambinder says Mitt Romney was strong on health care at last night’s GOP primary debate:

His best moment may have been when he said that an insurmountable problem like the health care crisis can, indeed, be solved. It wasn’t just a candidate saying he was optimistic; he showed how optimism, will and plod can be potent problem-solving forces.

Except that Romney’s health-care plan is anything but a success. Here’s some of what PRI’s Sally Pipes recently wrote about his state health-care plan:

While Mr. Romney has moved on, Bay state residents are still feeling the aftershocks. Of the 115,418 people who have enrolled in the new plans, more than 90,000 have signed up for the 100% free option — free to the enrollee, if not to taxpayers. The plans for which people must pay close to full freight have been about as popular as wool sweaters in August. As of Sept. 1, only 7,164 people had signed up for these new plans, despite the July 1 mandate; that’s a mere 4% of the estimated eligible uninsured population.

Experts predicted that upwards of 70% of enrollees in the plans with subsidized premiums would be under 45, and fewer than 15% older than 55. In fact, 27%-40% were older than 55, depending on the plan. This is not surprising, since older people are more likely to be heavy users of health insurance. The flood of these enrollees is called adverse selection. This causes costs to spiral upward and coverage to dwindle.

This problem was supposed to be addressed by the universal mandate, but when the bureaucrats actually began implementing the plan they discovered health insurance is expensive because health care is expensive. Since they couldn’t repeal this reality they repealed the universal mandate, exempting 20% of the uninsured from the mandate.

Cato’s Michael Tanner doesn’t think much of Romney’s plan either.

If Romney is so proud of his accomplishment with the state’s health care, he ought to defend it in print. But as Matt Yglesias points out, his website has very little about the program—just a short blurb reading, “The health of our nation can be improved by extending health insurance to all Americans, not through a government program or new taxes, but through market reforms,” and a three-minute video of Mitt giving some fairly general answers to questions about health care, mostly touting the virtues of non-policies like encouraging education and gesturing toward his claim (which I’d dispute) that his state plan represented a "free market" way to require everyone to purchase insurance.

Update: This is especially amusing considering this line from Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker profile of Romney:

His campaign manager, Beth Myers, told me recently that Romney regularly checks Mittromney.com, and sends off e-mails to aides, asking them to add more detailed information to the site.