AP Photo Romney: Without Romneycare, no Obamacare

Without Romneycare, there would be no Obamacare, Mitt Romney claimed in new comments published Friday.

In a Boston Globe obituary for Staples founder Thomas Stemberg, who died Friday at the age of 66, Romney attributed his focus on health care as governor to a conversation the two had shortly after his election. According to the Globe, the late businessman asked Romney why he ran for governor, to which he replied that he wanted to help people. In turn, Stemberg told Romney that the most effective way to accomplish his goals in that regard would be to ensure health-care access for everyone.


“Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” said Romney, who helped Stemberg open the first Staples store in the 1980s with the backing of Bain Capital. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare. So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance.”

In public, Romney has always sought to distinguish his work in Massachusetts from the Affordable Care Act, which many health experts say draws upon policy innovations developed while he was governor.

Romney has long argued that his Massachusetts plan was never meant to be expanded to the national level, and he pledged in 2012 to grant every state a waiver from the law on his first day as president. He’s long advocated the law’s repeal. But his latest comments also mirror a recent suggestion by his wife, Ann, that the health law has been helped people with preexisting conditions get insurance.

In an interview with POLITICO earlier this month, Ann Romney said she was proud that her battle with multiple sclerosis had inspired her husband to pass his health law, and in turn led to the national law that helped cover people with preexisting conditions – a provision she called “the really good piece” of Obamacare “that we need to preserve.”

"My illness had a lot to do with Mitt making health care available to all of Massachusetts. I think it was a piece of his heart that was important to him," she said. "I feel like my life had some impact on health care and availability for all."

The former GOP candidate drove home the point during a discussion about health care last week on "The Axe Files," a University of Chicago podcast hosted by former Obama adviser David Axelrod.

"I think people ought to have insurance. And just like your experience with President Obama, my colleagues said, 'For a Republican to be talking about getting everybody insured is not good politics.' And I said, 'Look, I think I can see a pathway to get everybody insured and I’m going to do it,'" Romney recalled. "I recognized just how critical this is in the lives of people who don’t have care. And we could do a better job. And we also thought we could do it without having to spend more money. We thought we could take money from the free care pool we were already using and devote that to helping people buy insurance if they couldn’t afford it themselves. And we’re pretty pleased with what we were able to accomplish."

In an October 2013 speech in Boston, Obama trumpeted the similarities between the two laws in the way they were received and criticized, for that matter, to demonstrate that the law would work on the federal level.

"Businesses didn’t stop covering workers; the share of employers who offered insurance increased. People didn’t get left behind; racial disparities decreased. Care didn’t become unaffordable; costs tracked what was happening in other places that wasn’t covering everybody," Obama remarked, adding that although he and Romney "ran a long and spirited campaign against one another ... I’ve always believed that when he was governor here in Massachusetts, he did the right thing on health care."

Later in the afternoon, Romney took to Facebook to explain what he meant, reiterating that he would still repeal and replace Obamacare, which he said "has failed."

"Getting people health insurance is a good thing, and that’s what Tom Stemberg fought for," he wrote. "I oppose Obamacare and believe it has failed. It drove up premiums, took insurance away from people who were promised otherwise, and usurped state programs. As I said in the campaign, I'd repeal it and replace it with state-crafted plans."

Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.