The Republicans running for the presidential nomination got together in Orlando, Florida Sunday for another debate. We’ve pulled highlights from the transcript that might be of interest here at our little intersection of the web. There were no mentions of stem cells, cloning, chimeras or biomedical research. The breakdown — including a bonus item — is after the jump.
Mitt Romney responding to a question about whether he’s more conservative than Fred Thompson:
We solved the problem in health care in our state not by having government take it over, the way Hillary Clinton would — with private free-enterprise approaches.
John McCain responding to a question about his health care plan:
First of all, I think it is important that that will be one of the defining issues of this campaign, because we know that there will be Hillary-care resurrected. There will be efforts to raise your taxes. There will be efforts to have a single-payer big government solution by the Democrats. They’ve already espoused those causes. If you believe them, please take a trip to Canada or England before you decide to support such a thing.
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America has the highest quality health care in the world. Our job is to preserve it. Our job is to keep the costs down. Last year, the Medicaid inflation was 10 percent. No, no program in the world can survive under that. So of course we want to remove the employer (OOTC:EPLI) tax, and tax incentives, and move it to the individual. Give the individual a $2,500 refundable tax credit, a family a $5,000 tax credit.
If you need to have people in special categories such as congenital diseases, we may have to set up a fund to care for those. But the key is, make health care in America affordable and available. Don’t destroy it, as the Democrats want to do.
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Ron Paul responding to a question about charity care:
Well, we’ve had managed care, now, for about 35 years. It’s not working, and nobody’s happy with it. The doctors aren’t happy. The patients aren’t happy.
Nobody seems to be happy — except the corporations, the drug companies and the HMOs.
You take care of poor people by turning the medical care back into the system, where people have some choices.
Now, we have a mess because we have — a lot of people are very dependent on health care. But I have the only way we can afford to take care of people now, because we’re going broke, with $500 billion going to debt every single year. And we have a foreign policy that is draining us.
I say, take care of these poor people. I’m not against that. But save the money someplace. The only place available for us to save it is to change our attitude about running a world empire and bankrupting this country. We can take care of the poor people, save money and actually cut some of our deficit.
So you don’t have to throw anybody out in the street, but long term you have move toward the marketplace. You cannot expect socialized medicine of the Hillary brand to work.
And you can’t expect the managed care system that we have today, which promotes and benefits and rewards the corporations — because it’s the drug companies and the HMOs and even the AMA that comes to us and lobbies us for this managed care, and that’s why the prices are high.
It’s only in medicine that technology has raised prices rather than lowering prices.
(APPLAUSE)
Romney responding to a statement that his health care plan is similar to that of Hillary Clinton:
First of all, I’m not going to give the Democratic legislature credit for the plan that I helped build. So, I want to let you know I’m very proud of what we did in Massachusetts, and I think it’s a model that other states can adopt in some respects.
But let me tell you something about our plan. It’s different than Hillary Clinton’s in a lot of important ways. But one thing that I’m happy about is that Republicans are talking about health care. This isn’t a Democrat issue. It’s a Republican issue.
For Democrats, they want to have government take it over. And I don’t want to have the guys who did the cleanup at Katrina taking responsibility for health care in this country.
The right answer…
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The right answer is to get people insured, all of our citizens insured so they don’t have to worry about losing their insurance if they change jobs or have a preexisting condition.
But Hillary says the federal government’s going to tell you what kind of insurance, and it’s all government insurance. And I say no, let the states create their own plans, and instead of government insurance, private, market-based insurance.
Hillary’s plan costs an extra $110 billion. My plan doesn’t cost any additional money. We use the money we’re already spending, we just use it a good deal more wisely.
And the real question here is, are we going to talk about health care and get everybody insured with private insurance? Absolutely. Because the alternative is unthinkable. As P.J. O’Rourke said, if you think health care’s expensive now, just wait until it’s free. We’re not going Hillary’s way.
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An exchange between Romney and Duncan Hunter about health care mandates:
HUNTER: Yes. Wendell, I think the governor’s plan goes in exactly the wrong direction, because while it allows for private health insurance, it has lots of mandates.
He has a good piece of those 1,000 or so mandates that drive up the cost of health care. That means that every single plan in the governor’s state has to have certain things.
HUNTER: It’s got to have, for example, fertility coverage. Well, what if you’re 90 years old? We may appreciate Governor Romney’s optimism…
(LAUGHTER)
… but you may not need fertility coverage.
Those 1,000 mandates that we have throughout the States, where we do have mandated health insurance plans, is driving up the cost of health care by about 35 percent. We need freedom. We need to allow people to buy their health care across state lines. That will bring down the cost of health care.
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ROMNEY: Oh, I’ve got to respond to that.
GOLER: Briefly, Governor.
ROMNEY: We took as many mandates out as we could in our policies. And the legislature kept some there. I tried to take them all out; they put some back in. It was a compromise. They put some mandates there.
But, let me tell you how many we got out. The price of the premium for an individual, 42 years old, in Boston, used to $350 a month. Now, it’s $180. We basically cut it in half by deregulating.
ROMNEY: Congressman, you’re absolutely right that taking regulation out of insurance brings the price down, and that’s why my plan would go state by state, deregulate them so we can get the cost of premiums down. But it is unacceptable to keep talking about this and still have 47 million people without health insurance. We got the job done. This is the first state in America that is on track to have everybody insured. Half of my uninsured are now insured, and I am proud of what we’ve done.
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Mike Huckabee on the state of health care:
First of all, we don’t have a health care system. We have a health care maze. And we don’t have a health care crisis. We have a health crisis. Eighty percent of the $2 trillion we spend on health care in this country is spent on chronic disease. If we don’t change the health of this nation by focusing on prevention, we’re never going to catch up with the costs no matter what plan we have.
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The reality is it’s a health crisis, and I would further say that one of the challenges we face is that a lot of the Democrats want to turn it over to the government, while the Republicans want to turn it over completely to the private insurance companies.
I think the better idea is to turn it over to each individual consumer and let him or her make that choice. I trust me a lot more than I trust government or a lot more than I trust the insurance companies.
And we’ve got a situation with 10,000 baby boomers a day signing up for Social Security, going into the Medicare system. And I just want to remind everybody when all the old hippies find out that they get free drugs, just wait until what that’s going to cost out there.
(LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE)
Tom Tancredo responding to question about how he would help th 50 million Americans who don’t have health insurance:
One of the most interesting parts of this debate about health care is the fact that we continually talk about the federal government’s role in it.
We should actually be debating that specific point, not what kind of government program. You know, Michael Moore went to Cuba not too long ago, and wrote this documentary about the greatness of the system, how wonderful it was to be in Cuba and have a socialized medical system.
You notice, however, that Michael Moore came back to the United States.
(LAUGHTER)
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Now, there’s a reason that he did that, of course. It’s because we have the best system in the world. And why? It’s because we do rely more on individuals than not.
Really and truly, it’s a fascinating thing to think about this, that we have moved all the way to the point of simply debating what kind of federal plan we might have rather than debating what’s the constitutional right of the federal government to get involved in this particular issue. That’s a challenge I think we all have to accept.
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Now, if there’s a federal role, I completely accept the idea of giving people the greater opportunity — individual opportunity to use health savings accounts. Why? Because that takes individuals. They become the consumer in the marketplace dealing directly with the provider.
That’s called a marketplace. That will drive down the costs. Get the federal government — don’t even talk about our responsibilities, because they always — gives people the option to think that there is — naturally the federal government should be involved. It shouldn’t.
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Huckabee responding to a question about Hillary Clinton:
But I want to say this — you’ve asked: What’s the difference? No matter which one of us is on this stage — and, look, I like to be funny, let me be real honest with you. There’s nothing funny about Hillary Clinton being president. Let me tell you why.
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If she’s president, taxes go up, health care becomes the domain of the government, spending goes out of control, our military loses its morale, and I’m not sure we’ll have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism.
Tancredo on the solvency of Social Security and Medicare:
Let me tell you what health care means, with illegal immigrants: $1 billion a year in California, 86 or more hospitals closed, maybe up to hundreds of hospitals closed, throughout this country, because they’ve had to provide care for illegal immigrants and cannot be reimbursed.
So there’s a health care plan — I mean, problem — and a Social Security problem that also deals with illegal immigration.
Rudy Giuliani responding to a question about how he would address the solvency of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid:
And the fact is, Medicare and Medicaid and presently more expensive than Social Security.
And within 10 years, they’ll be twice as expensive. So they’re going to go bankrupt a lot faster. And they need a private solution as well.
What we need to do if we’re going to bring down the cost of Medicare and Medicaid is bring down the cost of the entire health insurance market.
And in the discussion you were having about health insurance before, the point that I think was missed — we only have 17 million people in America who buy their own health insurance. If we have 50 million or 60 million people who bought their own health insurance, the price of health insurance would be cut in more than half.
And the way you cover the people that aren’t presently covered — the people who aren’t presently covered with health insurance are not the poorest people; they’re covered with Medicaid.
The people who are presently not covered are all buying something — they’re consumers. They may be buying a television, they may be buying — I hate to mention a cellphone, but they may be buying a cellphone.
But in any event, they have — they have consumer power. They have to start getting into that market. It’s the only way in which you bring down costs.
So I think in both cases, if you start to establish a private market, you’re going to be able to figure out how to solve these things within costs that are sustainable.
(APPLAUSE)
Bonus item: Hillary Clinton was mentioned 31 times during this debate.
The New York Times has the full transcript.