This morning, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) responded to Mitt Romney’s health care PowerPoint presentation by saying, “to listen to Governor Romney it sounds like he likes everything about the Affordable Care Act except for the fact that it was signed by President Obama.” Patrick defended Romney’s signature health care law during his morning appearance on MSNBC and even suggested that the GOP presidential front-runner was responsible for convincing him to support the plan’s individual mandate:
TODD: Mitt Romney was the guy talking about mandates and he said — he embraced them a lot with a lot more gusto than he did yesterday. Candidate Obama didn’t like mandates. How did you change his mind on this?
PATRICK: Well, I’m not sure I did, because I started out skeptical of mandates as well, Chuck. You know, going back now six or seven years when we were still debating our health care reform here and when I was a candidate. That issue was being debated here it seemed — I was uncomfortable with it. I came to understand, listening to Governor Romney and the other business people and others who were involved with it that this is really a kind of classic insurance theory which is you spread the risk as widely as possible and keep costs down for everybody.
Watch it:
Indeed, when Romney first unveiled his health care plan in 2005, he said he came to support the individual mandate as a means of reducing “free riders” — uncompensated care for the uninsured — in the state’s health care system. “It’s the ultimate conservative idea, which is that people have responsibility for their own care, and they don’t look to government to take of them if they can afford to take care of themselves,” he told the Boston Globe on June 22, 2005.
“What I am saying is if you can afford insurance and don’t get it, and you can afford care and you don’t pay for it, it is no longer appropriate for you to just pass that on to someone else,” he added.
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