New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) hearts former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), so much that Christie says it is “completely intellectually dishonest” to compare RomneyCare to ObamaCare. Why? Because Romney didn’t raise taxes, and President Obama did. Oh.





Avik (pronounced O‐​vik) Roy explains how Christie gets RomneyCare so very, very wrong:

There isn’t a single person, left or right, who follows health policy seriously who disagrees with the assertion that Romneycare was the model for Obamacare. And Massachusetts has had to raise taxes, after Romney left office, to pay for the law’s significant cost overruns.

Here are some examples, left and right. But Roy o‐​mits a few important points.

Mitt Romney increased taxes the moment he signed RomneyCare. RomneyCare increased net government spending. That in itself is an increase in the tax burden. All that remains to be determined is who will pay for that added spending and when they will pay it. The fact that the incidence of that added tax burden fell after Romney left office does not mean that’s when the added tax burden was created. Mitt Romney has raised taxes on as many people as Barack Obama has. Half of RomneyCare’s new spending was financed by the federal government through the Medicaid program, which is financed through federal taxes, which fall on taxpayers in all 50 states. That means that when Romney financed half of RomneyCare’s new spending by pulling down more federal Medicaid dollars, he increased taxes on residents of all 50 states. RomneyCare was born of, and expanded, a corrupt scheme by Massachusetts politicians to tax residents of all 50 states. What motivated Romney to enact RomneyCare, as former Romney/​Obama adviser Jonathan Gruber explains here, was the widespread desire (within Massachusetts) to hang on to $385 million of federal Medicaid money that Massachusetts had secured using one of Medicaid’s notorious and fraudulent “provider tax” scams. In other words, the whole purpose of RomneyCare was to enable Massachusetts to hold on to $385 million that it received by defrauding and taxing residents of other states. And of course, Romney/​RomneyCare caused the tax burden that Massachusetts effectively imposes on non‐​Massachusetts residents to grow.

divChristie is so laughably wrong about RomneyCare that one cannot help but smile that his remarks came during the same news cycle as this:



Newly obtained White House records… 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…One of those meetings, on July 20, 2009, was in the Oval Office and presided over by President Barack Obama, the records show.





“The White House wanted to lean a lot on what we’d done in Massachusetts,” said Jon Gruber, an MIT economist who advised the Romney administration on health care and who attended five meetings at the Obama White House in 2009, including the meeting with the president. “They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model”…





Romney said the people involved in the White House meetings were “consultants,” not “aides”…





[Gruber said,] “If Mitt Romney had not stood up for this reform in Massachusetts … I don’t think it would have happened nationally. So I think he really is the guy with whom it all starts.”

All of which is pretty much what my colleague/​boss David Boaz and I have been saying since April 2010 in this well‐​worn Cato video:





