Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas, hit former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass., almost immediately in the presidential debate in Orlando for the relationship between Romney’s state-run health insurance and President Obama’s health insurance.
Perry’s campaign followed the live attack with a campaign statement on the issue:
“Mr. Romney can edit his book or run from the issue, but his own advisors say Obamacare and Romneycare are identical, costly job killers. Romneycare will prove to be the same political cement shoes that Obamacare is for Barack Obama’s reelection effort.”
In 2007, Romney famously called the Massachusetts individual mandate a good model for other states and predicted the United States would “end up with a nation that’s taken a mandate approach.”
Ron Suskind, in his new book Confidence Men, writes that an Obama adviser on the health-care issue wrote a memo patterning Obamacare after Romneycare:
“[Nancy-Ann DeParle] directed Obama’s attention to the only working model for [health care] reform in the country: Massachusetts, whose health care overhaul bill passed in 2005 under a brokered deal between then-Governor Mitt Rommnet and the state’s Democratic legislature. Those who viewwed the Massachusetts plan as already a compromise of principles, including Ted Kennedy, pointed out that the model — of an individual mandate, where citizens were required to purchase health insurance; of insurance exchanges, where they could choose from a wide array of policy options; and of government support for those who couldn’t manage the cost of premiums — had been the “market-driven” Republican position during the Clinton initiative in 1993 and for the decade to follow.
