The Massachusetts experiment inspired Obamacare, but the two laws aren’t the same. | AP Photos Romneycare returns

President Barack Obama wants Americans to believe this about his health care law: It’s just like Mitt’s.

After all, the White House used the 2006 Massachusetts health program signed into law by Republican Mitt Romney as its blueprint for the national model. And in case anyone missed the message last year during the presidential campaign, Obama will repeat it again Wednesday.


He’ll speak at Faneuil Hall, the 269-year-old downtown Boston marketplace that has taken on hallowed status in state legislative lore after Romney signed his law with Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy by his side.

There is more than symbolism here. Obama’s advisers insist that participation in Obamacare, though slowed by a botched website rollout, will ultimately match the late-breaking arc of Romneycare. And Obama will make the argument that Democrats and Republicans should put politics aside to implement the Affordable Care Act just as they broke party lines on the Massachusetts law.

( PHOTOS: 10 Sebelius quotes about the Obamacare website)

Obama and his aides have long used Romney’s program in the political arena both as a weapon and a shield. During debate over Obamacare in Congress, and now more recently, it’s been used to show that Obama is open to Republican-backed solutions. On the campaign trail last year, he and his aides used it to bludgeon Romney. David Plouffe, Obama’s former adviser, called Romney “the godfather” of Obamacare on “Meet the Press” in 2012.

But for all the Boston ballyhoo, the two laws simply aren’t the same — a fact acknowledged by some in the White House — and there’s no chance that national Republicans will beat their swords into stethoscopes to help diagnose and solve problems in the implementation of Obamacare. Still, Obama’s needs greater cooperation from Republican governors and state legislatures to make the law work, and his public appeal for bipartisanship could stoke constituents to pressure elected Republicans to get on board.

Some Republican governors have already taken steps to implement elements of the law. A handful have pressed their legislatures to adopt a massive expansion of Medicaid made possible by Obamacare, and a few others have looked at running their own enrollment systems — although the law is still largely being fought along partisan lines, even at the state level.

( QUIZ: How well do you know Obamacare news?)

The argument that the two laws are alike is “ridiculous and intellectually dishonest,” said Kevin Madden, a top adviser on Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “One’s a state plan that was tailored for a unique health care population of about 6.5 million people. Obamacare was a disastrous attempt to rearrange one-sixth of the world’s largest economy, while creating a one-size-fits-all federal standard for what used to be a state-by-state marketplace affecting over 300 million people.”

Jon Kingsdale, the former executive director of Massachusetts’s program who helped advise Obama in writing the 2010 national health care law, made a similar point in a White House conference call on Tuesday afternoon, to illustrate that the state program was simpler and therefore not prone to the same challenges as the Obamacare site.

The scope of the Massachusetts program was “minuscule” compared to Obamacare, Kingsdale said, noting that residents in his state never experienced the kinds of problems that have plagued the HealthCare.gov website.

( WATCH: Obamacare timeline)

“In terms of technology, our program was much simpler,” he said. “It was a small build. We didn’t have a lot of technical glitches.”

While the Massachusetts experiment — complete with an “individual mandate” to buy insurance — inspired Obamacare, their paths diverged almost from the beginning.

In 2005 and 2006, Republican Romney presided over a divided government and hammered out a hard-fought compromise with an overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature. It passed with the support of 192 of the 194 lawmakers who voted on it. Obama, by contrast, jammed his law through a Congress dominated by his own Democratic Party without a single Republican vote.

Since Romney’s law was enacted, state legislators have worked, often in bipartisan fashion, to tweak it and correct flaws. Those changes have included rejiggering the way businesses count employees and adjusting required benefits. Unlike their Washington counterparts, their experience in passing the law created a bipartisan buy-in that has proved invaluable in making sure the system is sound.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who led the charge against Obamacare in 2009 and 2010 and has since sought to defund it, delay it and otherwise gut it, said Tuesday that there’s “no way to fix this monstrosity.”

The rollout of each law, too, occurred in a markedly different environment. Massachusetts residents largely approved of the law — and it still gets high marks today. Early polling even showed more than half approved of the mandate to get coverage — a figure that some supporters of the law thought was dangerously low at the time. Obamacare’s mandate routinely registers support in the teens. And computer failures in 2006 weren’t part of the storyline.

“I don’t think the rollout in Massachusetts was remotely as rocky as this is,” said Bradley Jones, the Republican leader of the state House of Representatives, who voted for Romneycare.

Although the number of paying enrollees was a slow trickle at first, Massachusetts’s law also included a mechanism to automatically sign up the neediest residents, so a few thousand — in a state with a already-low uninsured population — were instantly covered just a few months after the law took effect in 2006.

Sarah Iselin, the state commissioner of health care finance and policy for Gov. Deval Patrick’s (D) administration during the rollout of the 2006 reform, said despite the obvious differences between the national and state laws, there are some parallels worth considering.

“The building blocks of the laws are very similar,” she said. “Among the things that are instructive about Massachusetts is, whenever you’re undertaking an effort as big as this, it’s inevitable that you’re going to have to make some tweaks.”

Iselin said the Massachusetts effort, too, took a while to “get traction” among enrollees.

“It’s still early, and certainly some of the operational challenges haven’t helped things,” she said of Obamacare. “I’m hopeful that as people dig in more and understand it that it will eventually enjoy the same level of support.”

Obama’s aides and advisers say that his Wednesday speech will point to the benefits of Obamacare, the importance of the two parties working together to make the program work effectively and the fact that the Massachusetts enrollment was backloaded. Even if the comparison between one small state and 49 others isn’t perfect, they say, they are confident that the arc of Obamacare will track that of Romneycare.

“What matters is the fact that it will ramp up and that it will ramp up over time,” said Jon Gruber, an MIT professor who advised both Romney and Obama on building their programs. “The success of health care reform needs to be measured in months and years, not days and weeks.”

Gruber acknowledged the the experience for consumers will vary from state to state and that “rollout could be a bit more rocky” in states where Republican governors haven’t embraced Obamacare. But, he said, he believes that success in some states is going to put pressure on others.

“I hope that pressure will work eventually to get those states to behave,” he said.