United Liberty

Mitt Romney is still parading the health care reform bill passed in Massachusetts when he was Governor as “the ultimate conservative plan”:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney insisted on Sunday that the health care reform plan he implemented in Massachusetts had no similarity to the one President Obama is championing, in part because Romney’s was state-based and Obama’s is a national overhaul.
[…]
Romney refused to acknowledge that his plan was similar to Obama’s. Though, as host Chris Wallace point out, on many key measures — an individual and employer mandate, subsidies for those who would have trouble buying insurance, and minimum standards for coverage — the two plans converged. The likely 2012 presidential candidate pointed out that the president’s plan included cuts to Medicare and additional taxes. But both of those measures are designed, in part, to provide funds to keep per capita spending down — something that the Massachusetts plan failed to do. Finally, Romney touted the fact that his plan included “no controls over insurance premiums, price controls,” which provides some explanation for why premiums in the Bay State are the highest in the nation.

Andy Roth from the Club for Growth disputes this notion:

The individual mandate is diametrically against what free-market conservatives believe in than I think he is in the wrong party.

In my podcast with Michael Cannon last week, I asked what states had taken on proposals similiar to what President Barack Obama is pushing at the national level. Cannon pointed to Massachusetts. The plan that Romney promotes as some great achievement has increased insurance premiums and health costs at a much faster rate than the rest of the nation and been a huge strain on the state’s budget, so much so that the federal government had to come to the rescue.

Romney’s plan, even though it was pushed by the Heritage Foundation, is anything but conservative.