ANN ARBOR -- The fallout continues just days after former Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney outlined opposition to President Barack Obama’s healthcare law and tried to set the record straight on healthcare reforms he enacted as governor in 2006.
Romney has been on the defensive ever since a high profile Thursday afternoon speech at the University of Michigan carried live on several media outlets including CNN.com and C-SPAN3.
On Saturday, an editorial in the Washington Examiner urged Romney to stop “stop defending the indefensible.”
“The reality that Romney cannot avoid and will not be allowed to ignore during the 2012 presidential campaign is that Obamacare and Romneycare are essentially identical. Both force individuals to obtain health insurance,” it said.
On Friday he fired back at a Wall Street Journal editorial arguing Romney was partly responsible for giving universal healthcare political steam when he authorized the Massachusetts model, later served as a design for the Obama reform efforts.
"I was not surprised to read yet another editorial in the Journal yesterday criticizing the health-care reforms we enacted in Massachusetts," he said in a letter to the publication. "I was, however, not expecting the distortions of what we accomplished."
Meanwhile the Democratic National Committee released a video compilation dating back to a US Senate debate in 1994 where Romney first outlined his support for what conservatives call socialized medicine.
“I want universal coverage. I want everyone in Massachusetts and this country to have insurance,” Romney said in the debate carried on Boston’s WCVB-TV.
The clip later jumps to 2006 with video and audio from FOX News Channel’s Neil Cavuto reporting on then-Gov. Romney’s signing of legislation and his state “becoming the first state where universal coverage is now the law.”
Then it shows a clip of a 2008 Republican presidential debate with former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson chastising Romney for saying he liked mandates. Romney’s healthcare law requires residents to have coverage or pay the state. On Thursday he defended the mandate by saying it eventually reimbursed the state for any money spent on people who get sick, but decide not to get coverage.
He also added the Massachusetts healthcare plan was designed to help only 6 percent of residents, or about 500,000 people without coverage and served as a state solution to a state problem.
“ObamaCare” as conservatives call it, formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, has a controversial mandate requiring most uninsured Americans to have coverage or face fines. Romney calls that unconstitutional and says the federal law encroaches on the states ability to solve problems independently where such state driven solutions are viable.
Though his presidential campaign is in the official exploratory stages, Romney in effect launched a preemptive strike with the speech, in hopes of clearing what many pundits have considered a political albatross potentially separating him from the more conservative wing of the Republican Party, heading through the primary season. Romney will be in South Carolina later this month courting the evangelical wing of the party.
