ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Republican Mitt Romney outlined a national health care plan Thursday that would empower states to decide coverage rules, spelling out differences with President Barack Obama’s overhaul but refusing to renounce his own Massachusetts law that was a precursor to Obama’s.
The all-but-declared presidential candidate said that backing away from the plan he signed as Massachusetts governor or changing his overall health care vision would be politically expedient given that health care has become a liability rather than an asset for him among conservative critics in the past two years.
But he declared, “I am not adjusting the plan to reflect the political sentiment.”
The former Massachusetts governor tried to address a huge vulnerability in an appearance in Michigan, as well as counter the notion that he bends his positions to suit the current political environment.
He was lambasted during his first White House run for reversing his positions on abortion and gay rights for what critics called political reasons.
The health plan he described Thursday was the same one he proposed during his presidential run.
Romney used a 29-minute appearance in this early-primary voting state where he has family roots to lay out differences between the Massachusetts and federal plans. Instead of speaking from prepared remarks at a GOP-sponsored event at the University of Michigan hospital, he talked from notes and used a slide presentation to deliver what at times felt like a college lecture on health care.
Comparing his state version with Obama’s, he said: “Our plan was a state solution to a state problem. And his is a power grab by the federal government to put in place a one-size-fits plan across the nation.”
His pitch is unlikely to appease critics who want him to make a clean break from the Massachusetts law’s requirement that all residents obtain health insurance. That mandate is a cornerstone of the Obama-backed plan passed by Congress last year and despised by conservatives who have much power in determining the Republican presidential nominee.
Romney said the Democrats’ law, which is being phased in over several years, amounts to a takeover of the health care system that raises taxes and cuts services to seniors.
Romney said his 2006 version expanded coverage through private insurance plans without adding taxes in Massachusetts. If elected president, he said, he would let states come up with their own plans. Numerous analysts say Romney’s Massachusetts law raised taxes indirectly by redirecting Medicaid funds to pay for the expanded coverage.
Romney previously has had to explain reversals in his stands on abortion and gay rights. Critics say the changes were a politically expedient way to transfer a Massachusetts moderate-liberal into a staunch conservative who could win GOP presidential primaries.
This time, the health care issue is one of Romney’s biggest hurdles.
Like the federal law, the Massachusetts plan requires individuals to buy health insurance and imposes tax penalties on those who don’t. Both plans penalize small businesses above a certain size that don’t provide coverage to their employees. Both rely on new taxes for some of the financing.
