Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney charged on Sunday that President Obama’s signature law, the Affordable Care Act, is now threatening to undermine his second term. Despite the president’s repeated claims that “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan,” hundreds of thousands of Americans are now receiving cancellation notices from their insurance companies.”I think that fundamental dishonesty has really put in peril the whole foundation of his second term,” Romney said.
Though the former Massachusetts governor predicted that rising premiums and a sclerotic bureaucracy will plague the law as implementation continues, he insisted that the president’s empty promise will ultimately do the most damage. “I think the key thing that the president is trying to get away from, and that is that he told people they could keep their insurance and that was not the truth, and whether you like the model of Obamacare or not, the fact that the president sold it on a basis that was not true has undermined the foundation of his second term. I think it’s rotting it away.”
The president, according to Romney, could not afford to tell the American people the truth when he campaigned for the bill because “there would have been such a huge cry against it, it would not have passed.”
Romney rejected the comparisons drawn by the president in a speech last week between the Affordable Care Act and the health-insurance reform he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts, arguing that the Massachusetts plan was state-run rather than a “one size fits all” approach crafted by the federal government. “States should be able to craft their own plans to get all of their citizens insured and to make sure that preexisting conditions are covered,” Romney told NBC’s David Gregory.
In remarks at Boston’s Faneuil Hall to mark the seventh anniversary of the passage of& Massachusetts’s health-care legislation, President Obama praised Romney for doing “the right thing on health care” and told a crowd that his legislation was built on the Massachusetts model.
“Massachusetts teaches some important lessons some states are not going to want to follow,” Romney said. “One lesson is health insurance is more expensive in Massachusetts than anywhere else in the country. That is something that Texas and Minnesota and Montana are not necessarily going to want to adopt.”&