Call it the first must watch moment of the 2012 presidential cycle. On Thursday, Mitt Romney, Republican frontrunner and one-time health care mandate advocate, will take on the issue dogging his campaign in a speech in Michigan.
According to his campaign, Romney will lay out “his plan to repeal and replace Obamacare with reforms that lower costs and empower states to craft their own health care solutions” at the the Thursday speech, which he’ll give at the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center in Ann Arbor.
The speech will give Romney a chance to change the narrative on a central storyline of his candidacy — namely that the health care law he signed while governor of Massachusetts in 2006 is a potentially insurmountable political liability. For the man who’s been running for the 2012 Republican nomination virtually since he dropped out of the 2008 nomination fight, the stakes really could not be much higher.
Time‘s The Page first broke news of the speech on Tuesday morning. Mark Halperin wrote that Romney “won’t back off his past statements on his Massachusetts health care law” in the address.
“The plan he is releasing is an updated version of the one he ran on in 2008,” Halperin said.
Here’s what to expect in the plan, from Romney’s release announcing it:
Mitt Romney’s 2012 Principles for Healthcare Reform:
⢠Restore to the states the responsibility and resources to care for their poor, uninsured, and chronically ill.
⢠Give a tax deduction to those who buy their own health insurance, just like those who buy it through their employers.
⢠Streamline the federal regulation of healthcare.
⢠Reduce the influence of lawsuits on medical practice and costs.
⢠Make healthcare more like a consumer market and less like a government program.
ABC News’ Amy Walter and John Berman got some more details from the Romney camp:
A Romney adviser tells ABC News that he will address his own record on health care reform but that it won’t be a major focus of his speech…Look for Romney to continue his federalism defense: the plan he enacted was right for Massachusetts, but not for the entire country.
On the trail so far, Romney has tested a rhetorical escape on his health care law, which Democrats have said was a model for the law signed by President Obama last year: what’s good for an uninsured goose in Massachusetts is not necessarily appropriate for the national gander. Romney’s said he never intended the law to be a model for all of America and has promised to support a full repeal of the Democratic health care law as soon as possible should he be elected.
How this Thursday plays could have a big impact on how Romney’s frontrunner-by-default campaign moves forward. If Romney can shake off the fact that he once strongly supported just about the same kind of health care law Republicans as a whole now vilify as socialism, he may be able to reclaim some of the 2008 enthusiasm he’s lost.
