By Evan Falchuk
On Fox’s Hannity (h/t The Corner), former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney defends the 2006 health care reform he championed. He is playing a losing hand by trying to claim it isn’t “similar” to the President Obama’s health care reform:
Romney: Well, obviously there are some similarities and there are some important differences as well. Maybe I’ll start with the intent: the intent of our legislation was to get health care to work like a market and the intent of the Obama bill, the Obamacare program, is to have government take over health care. Our bill was a state solution to a state problem within the rights of the Constitution. Obamacare is a federal intrusion of power, taking over the rights of states and the rights of families and the rights of doctors. It is a massive abuse of constitutional power and for that reason I think it needs to be repealed and we need to do a better job to get health care reformed in a way that makes it look more like a market.
There are some other differences of course – Obamacare raises taxes by half a trillion dollars, it cuts benefits to seniors on the private side of medicare by a half a trillion dollars. Of course we didn’t do anything like that. And ours was an experiment, there were some mistakes in it, there are things I’d do differently the second time around. But that last thing I’d ever do would be to take what we had done for one state and impose it on the entire nation. It is simply be unconstitutional, it’s bad policy, and it’s wrong. [sic]
