Mitt Romney Praises Socialized Healthcare, As Long As It's Not American

—By Kevin Drum

| Mon Jul. 30, 2012 9:31 AM PDT

Over the weekend, as I was watching Mitt Romney extol the virtues of Israel's entrepreneurial spirit, I tweeted sarcastically, "Wikipedia tells me that top marginal Israeli tax rate is 48% on income over $125,000. I wonder if Romney knows that?" Apparently not. Here's Romney at a fundraiser in Jerusalem on Monday:

Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the G.D.P. in Israel? Eight percent. You spend eight percent of G.D.P. on health care. You’re a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18 percent of our G.D.P. on health care, 10 percentage points more....We have to find ways — not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to fund and manage our health care costs.

It kind of makes you wonder if Romney actually knows anything about Israel aside from the fact that they fight Arabs and Persians now and again. I mean, he does know that Israel has historically been a socialist state, right? And they have universal healthcare. ThinkProgress tweaks Romney by suggesting that he was praising a system that includes an individual mandate, but really, they're giving him too much credit. Yeah, there's a mandate, but it's a mandate to choose which of four free systems you want to sign up with. What Israel has isn't really a mandate in the same way Obamacare has a mandate, it's the full-blown lefty dream of free, universal healthcare funded through the tax system. Properly speaking, Romney ought to be appalled with their healthcare system.

And wouldn't that have been great? After visiting London and questioning whether they'd manage to pull off their Olympics, maybe he should have gone to Israel and chastised them for their socialist healthcare system. I'm not sure what that would leave for Poland, but I'm sure something will present itself. Maybe he could attend a concert and then muse afterward about how he's always thought Chopin was overrated.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, speaking of Israel and healthcare, I heard an interesting story a few weeks ago. It turns out that among end-of-life patients in hospitals, CPR is essentially useless. In America, we don't care. When a patient goes into cardiac arrest, we call a code and rush to their bedside anyway. In Israel, they don't. They deliberately respond slowly, essentially letting the patient die if he or she is near death anyway. In other words, in Israel they really do have death panels.

I wonder if Romney knows that? Probably not. Also: I'd love to hear either confirmation or otherwise about this policy. Is this really common practice in Israeli hospitals? Or did I hear some kind of garbled old wives' tale?