2012

Romney Defends Mass. Health Plan

Also defends individual mandate.

We’ll see how this goes. Mitt Romney delivered a highly anticipated speech on health-care reform, seeking to differentiate the plan he instituted as Massachusetts governor from the reform bill passed by Congress in 2009. Romney, who’s thought to be the frontrunner for the 2012 GOP nomination, has been dogged by calls to disown his plan, but he said in Ann Arbor, Mich., that he wouldn’t do that: “I, in fact, did what I felt was right for the people of my state.” But he also strived to differentiate his plan from the national plan, which President Obama has said was modeled on Romney’s. Romney is under serious pressure from conservatives to justify the plan’s mandate that all citizens either hold insurance or pay a penalty, a key tenet of Obama’s plan, but Romney said that’s acceptable at the state level.