I read the analysis below, and then I look at the hyperbolic rhetoric about how Mitt Romney is the most electable and Newt must be destroyed, and I just shake my head in disbelief.Via James Pethokoukis:
It’s one thing when Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum say Romneycare was the inspiration for Obamacare. Such charges can be written off or minimized as political exaggeration. But how about when an academic study in Health Affairs, a peer-reviewed, health policy journal, says it. The publication just published an analysis of Mitt Romney’s health reform in Massachusetts. And as least for political pundits, this is the big takeaway (bold for emphasis):
Just as Massachusetts’s 2006 health reform legislation provided the template for the Affordable Care Act, so the state’s experience under that legislation provides an example of the potential gains under federal health reform.
Indeed, the whole point of the study is to try and forecast the impact of Obamacare by looking at Romneycare. Don’t be surprised if the research, conducted by professors from the University of Minnesota and Harvard, gets a mention at tonight’s GOP debate.
Tell me this is not happening. How did we get here?
Update: James Antle, III:
Obamacare and Romneycare are so tightly linked that not even a polemicist as gifted and persuasive as Coulter can separate them.
Michelle Malkin, Confirmed: Romneycare = Obamacare
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