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During Sunday’s Republican Presidential debate in Florida, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney tried to distance his Massachusetts Health Care plan from Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) most recent health care proposal.
We solved the problem of health care in our state not by having government take it over, the way Hillary Clinton would [but] with private, free-enterprise approaches…Hillary says the federal government’s going to tell you what kind of insurance, and it’s all government insurance.
Romney emphasized that “we’re not going to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House by acting like Hillary Clinton.” But as Fact Checker points out, the plan Romney signed into law in Massachusetts sure acts like Clinton’s proposal. “Both plans mandate universal health care coverage and subsidize health care for people on low incomes. The main difference is that Clinton’s proposal permits people to switch to a Medicare-type plan and increases taxes at higher income levels.”
Rather than “having government take it over,” Clinton’s proposal incorporates the very same “private, free-enterprise approaches” Romney advocates. Clinton’s plan “offers people a choice. If they are happy with their present health plan, they can keep it. Otherwise, they can switch to the plans offered to members of Congress, or a government-run plan similar to Medicare.”
On Sunday, it seemed like Romney wanted to have it both ways. While egregiously misrepresenting, even lying about Clinton’s proposal to win Republican favor, Romney praised the same MIT economist, Jonathan Gruber, who helped design both his Massachusetts plan and Clinton’s proposal.
We wanted them insured, but we didn’t want government to have to pick up a new bill. And so we spent a lot of time working on it. We didn’t just have a bunch of bureaucrats. We had a professor from MIT, an investment banker, a head of a consulting firm.