THERE IS NO AMERICA:

Last year, at the University of Michigan, Mitt Romney gave a speech on health care to address his prior support for the individual mandate--the linchpin for the Affordable Care Act and Romneycare in Massachusetts. The core of his speech--and of his message on health care since then--was that it's unacceptable for the federal government to require health insurance for its citizens. As he said:

Our plan was a state solution to a state problem. And his is a power grab by the federal government to put in place a one size fits all plan across the nation.

Of course, this isn't true. The Affordable Care Act maintains the private health-insurance market and requires people to buy into it if they don't have insurance or qualify for Medicaid. If the ACA is a "one size fits all" plan, than by dint of similarity, Romneycare is the same.

It's for that reason that, at the time, I was skeptical of this whole maneuver. There was no way that conservatives could really believe Romney when he made the bogus distinction between his plan and the administration's. In the same way that discrimination is discrimination, whether it's practiced by local, state, or federal authorities, if the requirement to purchase health insurance is tyranny, then it's tyranny everywhere, regardless of how it's implemented.

As it turns out, I was completely wrong. Not only has Romney escaped any serious harm for his (huge) role in setting the template for "Obamacare" but his constant denunciations of the law have given him credibility with actual conservatives, who now endorse the former Massachusetts governor's logic on Romneycare. 

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