WASHINGTON – Mitt Romney said Sunday that President Obama’s second term was “rotting away” because of his broken promise that Americans could keep their health insurance under ObamaCare.
“When he told the American people that you can keep your health insurance if you wanted to keep that plan, period, he said that time and again, he wasn’t telling the truth,” the former Massachusetts governor said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“The fact that the president sold it on a basis that was not true has undermined the foundation of his second term,” he said. “I think it’s rotting it away.”
Romney returned to the political fray in response to Obama’s campaign-style event for ObamaCare last week in Boston, where he reminded the country that it was modeled after the Massachusetts health-insurance law enacted by Romney.
“Perhaps the most important lesson the president … failed to learn [from Massachusetts] was that you have to tell the American people the truth,” retorted Romney, who made a pledge to repeal ObamaCare the cornerstone of his failed GOP presidential run last year.
Romney said that ObamaCare, which squeaked through a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2009 and 2010, would not have passed if Obama told the truth that millions of Americans would lose their current plans.
Looking forward to 2016, Romney cheered on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to seek the GOP nomination and dismissed recent reports that suggest Romney had doubts about his close ally Christie being suitable for a presidential ticket.
“Chris could easily become our nominee and save our party and help get this nation on the right track again,” Romney said. “They don’t come better than Chris Christie.”
Romney insisted, as he did during the campaign, that Massachusetts’ health care law was good for Massachusetts but that other states shouldn’t be forced to adopt a “one-size-fits-all” federal law.
The Obama administration has been under intense fire – including from an increasing number of its Democratic allies in Congress – for the botched rollout of the health-care law.
Technical glitches have repeatedly crashed the government’s HealthCare.gov website where people were supposed to start signing up Oct. 1 for the new mandatory insurance.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans are getting cancelation notices from their health-insurance companies because of ObamaCare requirements, despite Obama’s promises that it wouldn’t happen.
“Some 6 million people could lose their insurance,” said Romney. “That’s not some little number. That’s 6 million American people.”
White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer defended Obama’s veracity.
“If the president didn’t intend to keep this promise, why would he have gone out of his way to put a provision in the law specifically says that if you have a plan before Obamacare passed you can keep that plan,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“Now if you’re plan has been downgraded or canceled, you can’t,” he continued. “But if the president were to allow people to have those plans be downgraded, or insurance companies to keep selling barebones plans … he’d be violating even more important promise to the American people, that everyone would have a guarantee to access of quality affordable health insurance.”