Oh Dear, He Really Is That Dumb

Last week a plane carrying Ann "Let them eat cake" Romney, was diverted because of smoke in the cabin, and this got Mittsy to thinking.....never a good idea:

"When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound."

But then he stepped in it further, by saying that people without health insurance should simply go to the emergency room. Yes. He did.

In a “60 Minutes” interview, Mittsy called emergency rooms a form of health care for people without insurance:

“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance. If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and — and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

Interesting. Stupid, but interesting.

And, well, it's quite different from what Mittsy himself said just a couple of years ago--sidenote: Who'da thunk Mittsy would have said one thing years ago and now say the exact opposite? Oh Yeah, all us....but I digress.

In 2010, he said part of the impetus for the Massachusetts health-care law was to keep people out of the ER:

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility.”

So, does he want the uninsured using emergency rooms if they can't afford health care or does he not want the uninsured using emergency rooms if they can't afford health care?

In his own book, which I'm assuming he wrote, and I'm hoping he at least read, Mittsy says: 

"Under federal law, hospitals had to stabilize and treat people who arrived at their emergency rooms with acute conditions. And our state's hospitals were offering even more assistance than the federal government required. That meant that someone was already paying for the cost of treating people who didn't have health insurance. If we could get our hands on that money, and therefore redirect it to help the uninsured buy insurance instead and obtain treatment in the way that the vast majority of individuals did — before acute conditions developed — the cost of insuring everyone in the state might not be as expensive as I had feared."

Someone needs to pick one side of an issue and then stay there.