This praise of Mitt Romney's "premium support" alternative to Medicare, from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, nicely spotlights modern conservatism's twin rackets of ideological self-delusion and naked disingenuity.
Romney says that all beneficiaries would receive the same fixed payment whatever plan they chose [emphasis original]. In other words, premium support would ensure that all seniors get basic coverage, but if they wanted more expansive coverage they'd have to pay for it themselves. This would introduce competition to keep down costs over time -- the alternative to the brute price controls and rationing of ObamaCare.
Once seniors begin to see the results of competition, our guess is that most of them would migrate away from the Medicare status quo [emphasis mine].
And the WSJ's "guess" is based on ... what? In 2007, 92 percent of Medicare's age-65+ beneficiaries rated their coverage as better than "fair" or "poor." So what the WSJ disparages as the unfashionable "status quo," American seniors give a huge thumbs up.
Yet, inexplicably, under a Romney administration these satisfied seniors would be gripped by an insanely irresistible impulse to dump their good-to-excellent government coverage in favor of free-market splendors. Why? Well, because free markets are simply splendiferous, I guess.
That, and America's seniors, or so assumes the Journal's editorial board, are just plain nuts.