Talking Points Memo has the story:
In July 2009, Mitt Romney called on President Obama to require Americans to buy insurance as part of his health care plan, using “tax penalties” as a backstop — in other words, the individual mandate that Republicans virulently oppose.
It looks like this one will be hard for Romney to squirm out of. Romney was essentially explaining how Obama should handle health care, using his success in Massachusetts as an example of how it should be done on a national level:
“First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance,” Romney wrote. “Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others.”
The entire op ed is available
here.
After reading through the op ed, I imagine Romney will try to argue that he was really saying, "Hey, this is how Massachusetts did it, so you should encourage other states to do it this way too!" It's true that he doesn't explicitly say "the federal government should enact mandates," but he sure does imply it. Whatever the truth is on what he really believed at the time (he probably doesn't even know), he's going to have to waste a lot of time trying to explain this, and it won't look good.