Oh boy: Romney health-care appointee leaving to work on … ObamaCare?

Remember that Newsweek piece last month arguing that Mitt’s the very best person available to oversee O-Care? Well, The One may be looking for the next best thing. Philip Klein:

In a development that could have ramifications for the 2012 presidential race, Jon Kingsdale, the man who Mitt Romney appointed to help implement the Massachusetts health care plan, has stepped down. Though Kingsdale hasn’t announced where he’s moving to, a spokesman for his agency tells the Boston Globe that he will be “exploring opportunities to help with national health care reform.”

What does this all have to do with 2012?

Well, Kingsdale was appointed by the Romney administration in 2006, and tasked with running the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, which operates the state exchange on which Massachusetts citizens can use government subsidies to purchase government-designed insurance plans. This is the same basic infrastructure that Democrats just created at the national level, and Obama himself has repeatedly tied the two plans together in the past few weeks.

Doesn’t mean Kingsdale’s leaving to work for the feds — maybe he wants to be a lobbyist or some sort of liaison with the government for the insurance industry — but the talking points for Mitt’s primary opponents sure do seem to be mounting, don’t they? If the administration is pursuing Kingsdale, it would be another clever move by Obama to hurt the GOP by poaching political talent. He vacuumed up Jon Huntsman by offering him a job he couldn’t turn down just as the media was starting to chatter about him being the “great moderate hope” or whatever. Installing Kingsdale, a guy with a Romney pedigree, in a position of visibility vis-a-vis O-Care would create a perpetual thorn in Mitt’s side ahead of the primary. I’m mighty curious now to see if that’s what’ll happen.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s another video from the Cato Institute declaring ObamaCare the second coming of RomneyCare. My one quibble is with Boaz’s description of the individual mandate, contra Romney, as an affront to personal responsibility. I take his point — by definition, a “mandate” limits free choice — but there’s no true personal responsibility option on the table here. Americans aren’t about to refuse emergency treatment to someone who’s uninsured, even on grounds that they should suffer the consequences of being too irresponsible to buy insurance, so those emergency costs are sunk. The question is how to bear them with the fewest limitations on personal responsibility generally.

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