Mitt Romney Says President Obama Should Have Called on Health Care
WASHINGTON, April 2, 2011— -- All-but-declared GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney shot back at President Barack Obama today for his increasingly frequent words of praise for the health care reform law Romney put in place as governor of Massachusetts.
"He does me the great favor of saying that I was the inspiration for his plan," Romney said at a speech in Las Vegas. "If that's the case, why didn't you call me? Why didn't you ask what was wrong? Why didn't you ask if this was an experiment, what worked and what didn't?"
He continued, "And I'd have told him, 'What you're doing, Mr. President, is going to bankrupt us.' We can't spend more money."
As he prepares to launch a bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Romney has walked a fine -- and frequently awkward -- line on the issue of health care, defending the law he signed in Massachusetts, but emphasizing that, if elected, he would do away with the national reforms that represent a signature achievement of the Obama administration.
Romney said today that if elected, on his first day in office he would "grant a waiver for all 50 states on Obamacare and then go work to get it repealed."
At the speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based interest group, Romney called the Massachusetts law "an experiment" that "hasn't worked perfectly."
"We, as a state, took on a state problem," Romney said. "I would never impose something that we did for our state in other states."
Romney did not turn to the issue of health care until a question-and-answer session, and he used his remarks to offer a far-reaching critique of Obama's domestic agenda and what he described as a "wandering foreign policy."
Romney referred to the ongoing unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, saying that it could either be "one of the worst things to happen in the last 50 years" or "one of the most positive developments."
