Mark Steyn:

I sympathize with Mitt Romney (his health-care plan was really the only big signature legislation of a very brief time in executive politics), but what he did is part of the problem, not the solution.

According to what he’s told at least a couple of NR audiences I’ve been among, he sought to solve a problem that doesn’t exist — ie, that the uninsured are using emergency rooms as their family doctor, and supposedly the rest of the populace has to pick up the tab for that in increased health-care costs. In fact, ER use by the uninsured is in rough proportion to their percentage of the population, and the rest of the populace has to pick up a far greater tab for the under-reimbursement of doctors by Medicare. In other words, Mitt misdiagnosed the disease, and his prescription was a bigger dose of it:

The result is all the problems familiar to patients in socialized systems — longer wait times, fewer doctors, overstretched emergency rooms — with the uniquely American wrinkle of dramatically increased costs. Mass. residents now pay 27 percent more than the U.S. average.

If costs are the issue, it isn’t very difficult: As has been noted here many times, third-party transactions are always more expensive, whether the third party is an insurer or the government. Most people in the waiting room don’t care whether the procedure costs $200 or $20,000: Their only concern is whether the third party will grant access to it. If you mandate universal third-partyism, your costs by definition will increase. As a businessman, Mitt should have known that. So it reflects poorly on his judgment.

And it’s worse than that, because, of those citizens forced by Mitt to acquire insurance, nearly 70 percent are getting it all but totally subsidized by Massachusetts taxpayers. That’s a good example of another general principle — that, even if you accept his characterization of the plan, wonkish non-partisan technocratic reforms will invariably be turned leftward by the statist bureaucracy.

The Massachusetts State Treasurer now says Masscare nationwide will bankrupt America. No doubt. But first it will drive out doctors and private insurers, providing the perfect pretext a half-decade down the road for politicians to step in and move to full-blown single-payer governmentalization. Obama wants that. So, from his point of view, Obamacare makes sense. Mitt presumably doesn’t want that. So what was he thinking?