Will Obamacare Sink Romney in 2012?

Mitt Romney is a credible candidate for one reason, and one reason only: because he led the achievement of universal health insurance in Massachusetts. Yet, when Romney denounces Obama’s health reforms, he is criticizing a plan based upon his own accomplishments.

Question: Why is Mitt Romney a credible candidate for president?

Yes, he's a successful businessman. There must be a couple thousand people at least equally successful.

Yes, he did a good job running the 2002 Winter Olympics. Peter Ueberroth did a better job running the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics - and when he ran for governor of California, he finished sixth.

Yes, he was elected governor of Massachusetts. Every other governor in recent times to mount a credible campaign for president was first re-elected.

Romney is a credible candidate for one reason, and one reason only: because he led the achievement of universal health insurance in Massachusetts. Romneycare is the most important achievement of his public career. If it is discredited or discounted, what does that career amount to?

Here is Mitt Romney in NRO today, on the passage of a federal healthcare plan based in almost every relevant respect on his accomplishment in Massachusetts:

America has just witnessed an unconscionable abuse of power. President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation — rather than bringing us together, ushering in a new kind of politics, and rising above raw partisanship, he has succumbed to the lowest denominator of incumbent power: justifying the means by extolling the ends. He promised better; we deserved better.

He calls his accomplishment “historic” — in this he is correct, although not for the reason he intends. Rather, it is an historic usurpation of the legislative process — he unleashed the nuclear option, enlisted not a single Republican vote in either chamber, bribed reluctant members of his own party, paid-off his union backers, scapegoated insurers, and justified his act with patently fraudulent accounting. What Barack Obama has ushered into the American political landscape is not good for our country; in the words of an ancient maxim, “what starts twisted, ends twisted.”

His health care bill is unhealthy for America. It raises taxes, slashes the more private side of Medicare, installs price controls, and puts a new federal bureaucracy in charge of health care. It will create a new entitlement even as the ones we already have are bankrupt. For these reasons and more, the act should be repealed. That campaign begins today.

For all the ferocity of these three paragraphs, only two sentences offer a susbstantive objection to Obamacare.

"It raises taxes, slashes the more private side of Medicare, installs price controls, and puts a new federal bureaucracy in charge of health care. It will create a new entitlement even as the ones we already have are bankrupt."

It's true: Romneycare did not do those things. It did not create a federal bureaucracy; it created a state bureaucracy. It did not raise taxes; but instead was based on $300 million in free federal money. But in the main outlines, the two programs are identical.

Romneycare invented a mechanism to buy insurance with before tax dollars, just like Obamacare: the exchange. It more tightly regulated insurance practices, just like Obamacare. It imposed an individual mandate to buy insurance, and offered subsidies to those who could not afford it, just like ... you get the idea.

Devil is in the details as always of course. I'm sure a President Romney would have produced a different result than President Obama. But how different?

And if a President Romney had produced a plan based on his Massachusetts experience that did enlarge coverage, eliminate some of the worst abuses of the insurance industry, and set the country on track to slowing down the growth of healthcare costs - wouldn't he have regarded that as a huge success?

Now Romney is denouncing a plan based upon his own supreme achievement. But if Romneycare is a disaster when it goes national, then why elect its author to national office?

Romney may feel he has no choice. He senses that the same accomplishment that elevated him to within reach of the presidency now blocks him from ever quite getting there. It's like some dreadful tragedy. But it's not his tragedy alone.