In the 2008 campaign, Mitt Romney called the individual mandate a 'terrific
idea' and predicted it would be adopted throughout the nation
Mitt Romney
says President Obama should have called him about health care reform:
“He does me the great favor of saying that I was the inspiration of his plan,” Romney said of Obama. “If that’s the case, why didn’t you call me? …Why didn’t you ask what was wrong? Why didn’t you ask if this was an experiment, what worked and what didn’t. … I would have told him, ‘What you’re doing, Mr. President, is going to bankrupt us.’”
Michael Isikoff assembles the paper trail proving that for all intents and purposes, that's exactly what he did, albeit at the staff level:
Newly obtained White House records provide fresh details on how senior Obama administration officials used Mitt Romney’s landmark health-care law in Massachusetts as a model for the new federal law, including recruiting some of Romney’s own health care advisers and experts to help craft the act now derided by Republicans as “Obamacare.”
The records, gleaned from White House visitor logs reviewed by NBC News, show that senior White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three health-care advisers and experts who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006, when the Republican presidential candidate was governor of Massachusetts. One of those meetings, on July 20, 2009, was in the Oval Office and presided over by President Barack Obama, the records show.
And far from Mitt Romney's statement, what Romney's advisers told President Obama was that Massachusetts was the model the nation should use. Of course, that shouldn't surprise anyone. As the video at the top of the post reminds us, Mitt Romney has felt that way since the beginning—at least until the 2012 election rolled along, that is.