“To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Gov. Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care. There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President Obama’s economy.”
~Andrea Saul, President Romney’s Spokesperson
A rare moment of honesty from the Romney campaign. Yesterday – we shared an ad from the pro-Obama SuperPAC HERE … and the Romney campaign was trying to respond to it today.
Cutting through all the noise … it comes down to this. An employee gets laid off when Bain Capital shuts down a steel mill. He loses his healthcare policy which means his wife lost her healthcare. He had a very hard time finding a job and without health insurance – she dies from cancer 5 years later. The response from Romney’s campaign was this:
If she lived in Massachusetts … she would have had Romneycare – she’d still be alive today.
That’s just brilliant. Romneycare and Obamacare are almost identical. Obamacare was modeled after Mitt Romney’s very successful healthcare law that he doesn’t want to talk about and says he would repeal Obamacare. Game. Set. Match.
How do you say you’re going to repeal an entire healthcare law that you implicitly admit would have saved everyone else who DIDN’T live in Massachusetts? He has a real problem on his hands … can’t wait to see the disavowing of this soon.
Also – notice how Romney’s spokesperson says the employee Joe Soptic lost his job in 2001 and that Romney left in 1999. The Romney campaign continues to say this even though Romney was the sole shareholder, CEO and president of the company. One of his spokespeople explained that he “retroactively left”. We’ve written about this HERE and HERE.
Greg Sargent adds HERE:
The larger story here is this: Even if this ad makes unsupportable charges — and even if you think there’s nothing objectionable about Bain’s conduct — the ad dramatizes a larger story about what has happened to the middle class in this country. There is a straightforward difference of opinion between the two candidates over how to respond to this — over the degree to which the federal government should intervene to protect people like Ms. Soptic.
Obama believes in aggressive federal action to cushion the blow of market outcomes like the one that hit families like the Soptics with such force. Romney — even though his campaign has now said universal health care is the right answer in cases like hers — is promising to roll back government protections for families like theirs. Whatever you think of the ad, that’s the more important larger argument to be having here — and it has been clarified this week.
And as we wrote HERE today – the problem for conservatives is that they think America’s healthcare system is the best in the world even though a recent study of 7 major countries found the U.S. to be dead last in 2010… AGAIN. But conservatives really want to get rid of Obamacare.
