Things You Can't Make Up - Romney & The Obamacare Mandate

Mar 3rd, 2012

Who Mitt Romney really is or what he really believes is anyone's guess at this point. He has been for so many things before opposing them, and vice versa, that there is no longer any way of knowing.

Sahil Kapur makes this entertaining catch today:

"In July 2009, Mitt Romney called on President Obama to require Americans to buy insurance as part of his health care plan, using “tax penalties” as a backstop — in other words, the individual mandate that Republicans virulently oppose.

In a USA Today op-ed titled “Mr. President, What’s the Rush?,” which has since been removed but remains available on MittRomneyCentral.com, Romney urged Obama to look to his Massachusetts health care plan that contained the same policy, and touted it as effective.

“First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance,” Romney wrote. “Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others.”

Obama opposed that approach in his 2008 campaign, and was not on board with it at the time of Romney’s op-ed, but eventually adopted it in the sweeping bill that became law March 2010. Republican voters strongly decry the mandate as egregious federal overreach, and Romney has vowed to repeal the entire law if elected President." EMPHASIS MINE

This is more than a flip flop. This is Mitt Romney recommending a policy to the President the adoption of which he now singles out as a reason not to re-elect him.

Good times.