You may have heard that earlier this morning Mitt Romney said, "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me." He wasn't talking about literal pink slips, however. This being Mitt "Corporations are People" Romney, he meant that he likes being able to fire corporations—like insurance companies—that provide services to him.
Via Think Progress, here's the full quote:
I want people to be able to own insurance if they wish to, and to buy it for themselves and perhaps keep it for the rest of their life and to choose among different policies offered from companies across the nation. I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep people healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me.
That may have been a good defense of Romney's approach to the individual health insurance market in Massachusetts, but now that he's a Republican presidential candidate, his health care proposal would do the exact opposite. He wants to repeal Obamacare, and by repealing Obamacare, Romney would not only eliminate the health care exchanges in which insurance companies will sell highly regulated plans to consumers, but he would also restore the ability of insurance companies to deny coverage to individuals based on pre-existing conditions.
Romney can talk until he's blue in the face about wanting to give insurance companies incentives to keep people healthy, but allowing insurers to deny coverage based on health status would simply give insurers an incentive to dump healthy unhealthy customers. His words might sound superficially good, but his policies would head in the exact opposite direction. What he's proposing would let insurers fire us. Not the other way around.