This morning, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual Washington gathering of political activists and potential Republican presidential hopefuls. Romney’s much-anticipated speech was full of punch lines and jokes poking fun at President Obama, but made no mention of the universal health care reform bill he signed into law while governor — a sore point for many conservative activists and critics of “Obamacare.”

That law, which requires every Massachusetts resident to purchase health insurance coverage, establishes health exchanges, expands the Medicaid program, subsidizes coverage for lower-income people, offers abortion coverage, and requires insurers to offer a comprehensive set of benefits, has been widely compared to the Affordable Care Act enacted by Obama in March 2010 [See a comparison table of the two plans here]. Romney “has defended the Massachusetts health-care law by saying insurance mandates should be the prerogative of states and not the federal government,” and has tried to distance himself from national reform, which he believes is unconstitutional and must be repealed, by arguing that Obama was “wrong” to “take what is designed for one state and say we are going to apply that in every state.”

The former governor went a step further in the paperback edition of his book, “No Apology,” in which Romney emphasized the changes he would have made to the plan and how it’s different from “Obamacare.” Notably, these passages are much different than what appeared in the hardcover version of the book:

Hardcover:

Paperback:

“First, of course, I would reinstitute my vetoes of the legislature’s additions,” Romney writes in the paperback version, stressing that he believes that the “state should not mandate which benefits must be included in health insurance policies.” He also says that he would change the structure of the individual mandate to “provided a tax break for those who have health insurance rather than a tax penalty for those without health insurance.”

Despite these two attempts in one week to hide his own accomplishments, Romney hasn’t always been so bashful. In October of 2009, Romney urged Democrats to use the Massachusetts law as a model to expand coverage. “We have found that we can get everybody insured without breaking the bank and without a public option,” Romney told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta. “Massachusetts is a model for getting everybody insured in a way that doesn’t break the bank, doesn’t put the government in the driver’s seat and allows people to own their own insurance policies and not to have to worry about losing coverage. That’s what Massachusetts did,” he said.

ThinkProgress intern Paul Breer contributed research to this post.

After trashing the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for producing “garbage” reports about the deficit reductions in the Affordable Care Act and the GOP measure to repeal it, Republicans are now touting this video of CBO Director Doug Elmendorf apparently agreeing with their premist that health care reform will destroy jobs:

REP. JOHN CAMPBELL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, we’ll — and Dr. Elmendorf — and we’ll continue this conversation right now. First on health care, before I get to — before I get to broader issues, you just mentioned that you believe — or that in your estimate, that the health care law would reduce the labor used in the economy by about 1/2 of 1 percent, given that, I believe you say, there’s 160 million full-time people working in ’20-’21. That means that, in your estimation, the health care law would reduce employment by 800,000 in ’20-’21. Is that correct?

ELMENDORF: Yes. The way I would put it is that we do estimate, as you said, that…employment will be about 160 million by the end of the decade. Half a percent of that is 800,000.

Watch it:

The video cuts there, so I’m not sure if Elmendorf clarified the claim, but the CBO’s presentation on this matter suggests that the job loss claim is far more benign than the GOP would have you believe. First, in this presentation delivered at the Schaeffer Center of the University of Southern California in October of 2009, Elmendorf suggests that effects on employment would “probably be small.” “The legislation will affect some individuals’ decisions about whether and how much to work, and some employers’ decisions about hiring workers. We estimated that the legislation, on net, will reduce the amount of labor used in the economy by roughly half a percent, primarily by reducing the amount of labor that workers choose to supply.”

In other words, CBO believes that increasing access to health insurance could lead some people who are working to maintain access to health coverage to retire early or “take jobs that better match their skills, because they would not have to stay in less desirable jobs solely to maintain their health insurance.” Under the law, those individuals would be able to find coverage through the exchange or Medicaid.

What percentage of Americans would actually choose to do this, is of course unclear (Medicaid, after all, has only a 65% participation rate and CBO admits “overall impact on labor markets, however, is difficult to predict“), but leaving a job that you’re at simply because of the health coverage it provides is certainly different than businesses closing shop because of any mandates or new regulations.