Romney Campaign - Dunk the Duck Arcade

Romney's presidential campaign looks like the Dunk the Duck carnival arcade game.  Although glitches, mis-steps and glaring inconsistencies are obvious, the number of incidents are becoming like the moving targets in an arcade game.  It's like, the more pop-shots the media has for exposing these errors, the faster they appear on the political arcade.  Like a row of moving ducks, eventually, it becomes impossible to take aim at the campaign glitch of the day.

Here's two recent and avoidable problems:

1.  Romney bad behavior at Hispanic Univsion TV interview- "tantrum": 
 http://www.examiner.com/article/univision-inside-romney-s-tantrum

Anchors who hosted this interview between an Hispanic television audience and Governor Romney reported how the Romney campaign insisted on busing in supporters.  Governor Romney also wanted his introduction to be taped over again.  As a matter of fact, he is reported to have exhibited a tantrum to get his way.

This is an avoidable error - did Governor Romney believe his behavior would escape scrutiny?  Of course, we find out later, this insistence on bused in supporters and a trumped up introduction was deliberate to make President Obama's scheduled appearance seem lack luster in comparison.

Governor Romney's campaign staff should have foreseen problems with the Univision interview and stop gaped the error. In other words, this "tantrum" incident should never have made any news- at all!  Moreover, the report of a "tantrum" can't be an isolated incident. In my experience, tantrums are a pattern of behavior.  It's likely other Romney tantrums have been covered up.  A history of tantrums explains how the serial inconsistencies keep occurring in the Romney campaign - his staff is fearful of confronting him.  This is a huge problem.

Reported by www.examiner.com (link above):
"...when moderator, Jorge Ramos introduced the candidate, he also noted the time difference; Romney was giving the audience 35 minutes, Obama offered an hour. The audience applauded, and waited. But Romney was backstage, offended by the introduction. He allegedly refused to appear until Univision agreed to re-tape the introduction."

2.  Emergency Department as a health care safety net- he flip-flopped on 60 Minutes:

http://www.wnyc.org/npr_articles/2012/sep/25/romney-medicaid-remarks-raise-eyebrows/

It's not so much what Mitt Romney said about whether the government should guarantee people health care in his Sunday 60 Minutes interview that has health care policy types buzzing. It's how that compares to what he has said before.

To back up a bit, Scott Pelley asked the former Massachusetts governor if he thinks "the government has a responsibility to provide health care to the 50 million Americans who don't have it today?"

Romney responded:  "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."

Incredibly, Romney was saying that people who don't have insurance can always go to the hospital emergency room. This huge flip-flop statement is plainly wrong minded, not to mention being contrary to providing less expensive and high quality health care.

Yet in a 2010, MSNBC appearance, Romney said almost exactly the opposite: '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,' he said at the time."

That's because, back then, Romney was defending the Massachusetts law he signed as governor. It's the one that requires most people to either have health insurance or pay a fine — just like the federal law he now vows to appeal because it's called "Obamacare" (for the life of me, I don't understand how Romney gets out of this hole, but his ardent supporters ignore this obvious hypocrisy like it's a railed off pothole in the highway, they just drive around it.)

He used even more colorful language in 2007, talking to Fox News host Glenn Beck. "When they show up at the hospital, they get care; they get free care paid for by you and me," he said. "If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is." (OMG! This isn't socialism, because the cost of uncompensated emergency department care is paid for by cost shifting to private insurance premiums and private pay patients, and that's not socialism.)

As a nurse and former non-profit health care administrator, I don't know how it is Romney's advisers didn't inform him that emergency department care is one of the principle reasons why health care is so expensive.  Moreover, reliance on Emergency Medical Services as somehow being a safety net for acute care, is a myth, unless insurance companies, including Medicare and Medicaid, are willing to pay for it - and right now, there's no bundled payment for ambulance transport.  In other words, ambulance transports are seldom included in health insurance coverage plans, unless trauma related.

Both incidents above were avoidable errors. They are among the growing list of examples of how the one term governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, cannot be relied upon to be President of the United States.

Americans must re-elect President Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden. They instill confidence, demonstrated by their consistently steadfast leadership and understanding of the values of the American people. 

Let's be sure to hold the news media accountable for holding up the quick moving "Dunk the Duck" incompetency of the Romney campaign and expose them.