WASHINGTON — On the second anniversary of President Barack Obama’s signing of the law overhauling the U.S. healthcare system, Mitt Romney set out to achieve two goals: renew his vow to repeal it and diminish assertions that the Massachusetts law he backed was a model for it.
Standing amid signs reading “Repeal and replace Obamacare,” the front-runner in the Republican presidential race said Friday that the federal law has increased government spending, raised taxes and violated religious freedom.
“This presidency has been a failure, and the centerpiece of that failure is this piece of legislation,” Romney told voters in Metairie, La., as he campaigned in advance of the state’s primary today.
It’s an issue that worked for Republicans in 2010 when opposition to the law from anti-tax Tea Party activists helped give the GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives and expanded numbers in the U.S. Senate.
The four remaining Republican presidential candidates all have promised to make repeal of the law they call “Obamacare” a central focus of the 2012 campaign.
Romney on Friday called the law “an unfolding disaster for the American economy, a budget-busting entitlement and a dramatic new federal intrusion into our lives.”
Yet as he attacked the law, he also sought to defuse the criticism he has taken for the Massachusetts mea- sure and its link to the federal one. In an article published in USA Today, he reiterated his opposition to a “one-sizefits-all health-care plan” and outlined his support for providing financial assistance to states so they can implement their own proposals.
“When I was governor of Massachusetts, we instituted a plan that got our citizens insured without raising taxes and without a government takeover. Other states will choose to go in different directions,” Romney said in the article.
“It is the genius of federalism that it encourages experimentation, with each state pursuing what works best for them,” he said. “Obamacare’s disregard for this core aspect of U.S. tradition is one of its most egregious failings.”
Since the Affordable Care Act became law, public opinion has remained divided on it, with polls showing stronger opposition among Republicans and independents than support from Democrats.
In a Bloomberg National Poll conducted March 8-11, three-fourths of Republicans and 44 percent of independents said the law should be repealed, while 8 percent of Democrats agreed. The margin of error in the survey of 1,002 adults was 3.1 percentage points.
The White House on Friday released a report highlighting the benefits of the overhaul, including a provision that makes it illegal for insurance companies to refuse to cover people who have pre-existing medical conditions.
In a written statement, Obama said the law “has made a difference for millions of Americans, and over time, it will help give even more working- and middle-class families the security they deserve.”
Republicans rolled out a coordinated effort to stoke opposition to the law with speeches on the House floor, rallies outside the Capitol and advertisements in battleground states.
In debates and at campaign stops, the Republican presidential candidates have said the law represents an unconstitutional overreach of government power that threatens personal freedom. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments next week in a challenge to the law from 26 states based largely on those grounds.
“If this law is allowed to stand, there will be no end to the power of government,” Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker seeking the Republican nomination, said in a statement Friday. “The government will ultimately control very personal decisions over life and death.”
Romney included the health-care law in a list of Obama administration policies he said have harmed the economy as he campaigned Friday afternoon in Shreveport.
“He’s been out there trying to take credit for his policies,” Romney said as he stood in front of an oil rig. “He’s confused. It’s his policies that have caused a lot of our problems.”
Rick Santorum, Romney’s main challenger in the Republican race, criticized Obama’s law and reminded voters that parts of it were based on the Massachusetts bill Romney signed as governor.
The Massachusetts law, like the federal program, includes a requirement that all residents buy health insurance or pay a penalty, a provision other Republicans have attacked.
The law ended up covering most of the uninsured in the state, but health-care costs have risen in the years since it was passed.
In addition to a mandate to buy insurance, both the Massachusetts law and the national plan include special marketplaces to buy insurance, as well as a series of requirements that health plans have to meet in order to sell plans there.
Romney’s support for the Massachusetts law, dubbed “Romneycare” by Santorum, has caused some voters to question Romney’s commitment to a smaller federal government.
“Mitt Romney had misled voters on Romneycare; he said he was not for mandates at the federal level when in fact he was,” Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, said in a statement his campaign released.
Santorum was on the defensive on another point, having to walk back comments he made Thursday that Republicans may leave Obama in office rather than back Romney.
“I would never vote for Barack Obama over any Republican, and to suggest otherwise is preposterous,” he said in a statement. “I was simply making the point that there is a huge enthusiasm gap around Mitt Romney.”
Obama, too, has made an effort to tie Romney to the national law.
“We designed a program that actually previously had support of Republicans — including the person who may end up being the Republican standard-bearer and is now pretending like he came up with something different,” he said in a Wednesday interview with National Public Radio’s Marketplace.
Romney’s attack on Obama’s law caught the attention of White House spokesman Jay Carney, who said Friday that the president would “not shy away from the opportunity to debate” the bill, particularly given Romney’s background.
“That debate will be engaged in the fall if the Republican nominee feels so strongly about it,” Carney said, referring to Romney as “one of the architects of this health-care reform.”
“As many have noted in both parties, the individual mandate provision of the president’s Affordable Care Act bears striking similarities to the individual mandate that was put in place in Massachusetts,” he said.
The individual mandate was originally proposed by a conservative think tank as an alternative to the national health plan that then-first lady Hillary Clinton proposed in the mid-1990s. Gingrich, then the speaker of the House, backed the individual mandate idea at the time.
Romney heads into today’s Louisiana presidential primary with a commanding delegate lead in the race to 1,144, the number needed to clinch the GOP nomination.
Romney has earned 563 delegates so far, compared with 263 for Santorum, 135 for Gingrich and 50 for U.S. Rep Ron Paul of Texas, according to an Associated Press tally.
Louisiana offers 46 delegates, but only 20 will be up for grabs in the primary. An additional 23 will be selected at the party’s state convention in June and three others go to the state’s Republican National Committee members.
Information for this article was contributed by Lisa Lerer of Bloomberg News; and by Kasie Hunt, Jim Kuhnhenn and Steve Peoples of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/24/2012