James Carter adds more evidence that Mitt Romney advocated health reform with an individual mandate as a national solution, before he opposed it. James posts this video from a speech Romney gave in April 2006 to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:
“I hope we continue to elect representatives on both sides of the aisle that want to see this work and want to see the market as the approach to getting everybody insured. See, I’m a Republican, as you probably know, and there are two approaches to getting everybody insured and to solving a national problem which is people without insurance and, therefore, people who are getting care without paying anything, just showing up in hospitals….
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“One is: have the government take it over. Just have the government take over health care and do it like Great Britain and Canada, which, in my view, would give us the kind of lousy health care that that could lead to. That would be the wrong way to go. In my view, the other direction is to move in favor of free market reforms and insisting on people buying their own insurance and having a stake in the insurance equation and having a stake in how much a particular procedure costs. That’s the direction I’m going.”
Awhile back, Greg Sargent posted a 2007 interview in which Romney suggested that after the states experimented with solutions for the uninsured, they’d end up choosing the individual mandate.
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