Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said President Barack Obama could have done a better job rolling out his version of healthcare reform — and failed to learn from the former Massachusetts governor’s state-wide healthcare plan’s implementation.
Romney stuck to his presidential campaign position when confronted with the comparisons of Obamacare with Romneycare, which was that healthcare reform should be left up to the individual states.
“I think the president failed to learn the lessons that came from the experience in Massachusetts,” Romney said on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” on NBC. “First of all, the Massachusetts experience was a state-run plan. The right way to deal with healthcare reform is not to have a one-size-fits-all plan that’s imposed on all the states, but recognizing the differences between different states and their populations. States should be able to craft their own plans to get all their citizens insured and to make sure pre-existing conditions are covered.”
Romney also pointed to differences between his state-run healthcare plan versus Obamacare.
“And there’s some other differences,” he continued. “In Massachusetts, we phased in the requirements, so that there was a slow rollout. That way you could test the systems as you went along to make sure there wouldn’t be glitches. And perhaps the most important lesson the president, I think, failed to learn was, you have to tell the American people the truth. And when he told the American people that you could keep your health insurance if you wanted to keep that plan, period — he said that time and again, he wasn’t telling the truth. I think that fundamental dishonesty has really put in peril the whole foundation of his second term.”
Romney went on to criticize the president for his statements about Obamacare, especially the claim that Americans could keep your plan if they liked it.
“We could talk about the technical differences between the Massachusetts plan and the federal plan,” Romney said. “But the key, I think, that has really undermined the president’s credibility in the hearts of the American people, is that he went out as a centerpiece of his campaign and as a centerpiece of Obamacare over the last several years, saying time and time again that fundamental to his plan was the right people would have to keep their insurance plan. And he knew that was not the case. He could know it by looking at Massachusetts and seeing people there lost insurance. He could have learned those lessons and told the people the truth, but he didn’t. He told people they could keep their plan. And, you know, it was NBC News that said, look, some 6 million people are going to lose their insurance. That’s not some little number. That’s 6 million American people.”