There’s definitely no Republican presidential contender for whom the one-year anniversary of the Democratic health care reform bill is more important than Mitt Romney. Under attack for the similar health care reform measure he signed into law while governor of Massachusetts, Romney’s been trying to establish himself as the most anti-health care reform law kinda-sorta candidate in the race.
Late last night, Romney took a new tack: I’ll kill Obamacare as much as I can on my very first day in office if I’m president.
“If I were president, on Day One I would issue an executive order paving the way for Obamacare waivers to all 50 states,” he wrote in the National Review. “The executive order would direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services and all relevant federal officials to return the maximum possible authority to the states to innovate and design health-care solutions that work best for them.”
Romney’s waivers would let the states create their own health care reform packages that do at least as much as the federal reform bill would. Now, letting the states do their own thing sooner rather than later is something that progressive governors and President Obama have already called for.
In Romney’s world, the waivers are the first step toward undoing the legislation it took Congress most of a year to create.
“Of course, the ultimate goal is to repeal Obamacare and replace it with free-market reforms that promote competition and lower health-care costs,” he wrote. “But since an outright repeal would take time, an executive order is the first step in returning power to the states.”
This has been Romney’s line for a while now: what I did in Massachusetts was only good for Massachusetts (though maybe it wasn’t so great for Massachusetts after all) and it would be against everything American for me to try and push it on the rest of the country.
Still, as Greg Sargent noted today, as recently as 2009 Romney was calling his Massachusetts reforms an example for the nation.
This from an unaired CNN interview:
“I think there are a number of features in the Massachusetts plan that could inform Washington on ways to improve health care for all Americans,” Romney told CNN. “The fact that we were able to get people insured without a government option is a model I think they can learn from.”
CNN notes that while Romney’s plan didn’t have the public option that Republicans derided and Democrats abandoned last year, it did center around “an insurance mandate, something many conservative Tea Party Republicans view as unconstitutional.”
Steve Kornacki at Salon told the history of Romneycare last year and illustrates how, despite his bluster today, Romney is probably not too thrilled to have the political focus be on health care once again during this anniversary week.
After all, Kornacki writes, “Romney is actually the only governor in American history ever to impose an individual health insurance mandate on his citizens. And an individual mandate, of course, is at the heart of Obama’s reform package.”
