January 26, 2012 | 1:51 PM |

Huge Similarities Between ObamaCare And RomneyCare, Group Finds

FILED UNDER: Insurance, Medicine/Science, Politics, obamacare, romneycare

Many people focus on the “individual mandate” (the requirement that folks must purchase health insurance) as the chief similarity between the 2006 health reform law passed in Massachusetts under then-Gov. Mitt Romney, and the 2010 national health law signed by President Obama. But the similarities between RomneyCare and ObamaCare go far, far beyond that, according to a new side-by-side analysis by the liberal-leaning nonprofit advocacy organization, Families USA (with help from Harvard School of Public Health’s John McDonough and Brian Rosman, Research Director of Health Care For All).

From insurance exchanges to new rules for insurers and employers and beyond, the two plans really do have a deep twin-like resemblance according to this analysis, if not identical, then at least fraternal. Take a look.

Of course, the political backstory to all this is that Romney has been struggling to highlight the profound differences between the two laws while the Obama administration continues to point out the similarities. Romney and the other GOP presidential candidates debate again tonight, in Jacksonville, Florida, ahead of that state’s primary on Tuesday.

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →

  • Reasonable?

    At the risk of sound Romney-ess, I think it’s an important distinction between federal and state mandates.  We are in an experiment in MA, and we don’t know if our solution is correct.  There could be other models that work.  So I’m a little hesitant about the whole nation joining the MA experiment.  I think there should be strong federal incentives for states to mandate universal coverage, but not a federal requirement.  States that choose not to provide insurance would suffer an economic penalty and probably over time be less attractive to citizens from other states.

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_JDUCKENTHHZIJ355SFCWMSOQII John Miller

      The problem with your position is that no government, local, state, or federal, should have the power to require citizens to buy anything.  A state mandate is just as bad as a federal mandate.