Andrea Saul said people are losing their jobs and their health care in Obama’s economy. Romney spox cites Mass. health law

A Mitt Romney spokesperson offered an unusual counterattack Wednesday to an ad in which a laid-off steelworker blames the presumptive GOP nominee for his family losing health care: If that family had lived in Massachusetts, it would have been covered by the former governor’s universal health care law.

“To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care,” Andrea Saul, Romney’s campaign press secretary, said during an appearance on Fox News. “There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President [Barack] Obama’s economy.”


The ad by Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting Obama, features Joe Soptic, a steelworker from Indiana who was laid off from a plant owned by Romney-founded Bain Capital, discussing his wife’s cancer and eventual death. Soptic said his family lost health insurance after he was laid off.

Saul disputed the ad’s accuracy — Soptic’s wife didn’t die until several years after her husband was laid off, and had health insurance from a job of her own during some of that time — and called the ad “despicable.”

Bill Burton, a strategist for Priorities USA, said he’s as “stunned as anyone that [Saul] would invoke Romney’s support for individual mandates, particularly in a state that wasn’t Massachusetts.”

“They’re clearly sputtering in response to very painful stories from workers who lost their jobs, their health care and their pension benefits,” Burton said.

The health care law Romney helped to craft and signed in 2006 is often described as a forerunner to Obama’s own health care overhaul, which passed Congress four years later without a single Republican vote.

Romney has said his law worked for Massachusetts but wouldn’t necessarily work in other states. He has pledged to grant every state a waiver from Obama’s law on his first day in office and said he would work to repeal the legislation in its entirety.