TRENDING: Santorum blasts Gingrich over ‘Romneycare’

Posted by admin American Politics Saturday, March 10th, 2012

Springfield, Missouri (CNN) – It’s a common aspect of Republican Rick Santorum’s stump: attacking Mitt Romney for creating – and then “recommending” – “Romneycare” to President Barack Obama.

But Saturday, fresh off his projected win in the Kansas caucuses, Santorum added that GOP presidential rival Newt Gingrich is “honestly not a whole lot better.”

“For 20 years when I was pushing medical savings accounts, he was pushing a federal mandate for health insurance,” Santorum said. “And when ‘Romneycare’ passed, he sent out a glowing statement talking about how this wonderful bill had just passed in Massachusetts.”

Santorum argues that Obama, Gingrich and Romney all line up on the same side when it comes to their support for an individual mandate.

The campaign points to a 2006 newsletter Gingrich wrote for his consulting firm, the Center for Health Transformation, in which he praised Romney’s Massachusetts health care reform.

“The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system,” Gingrich wrote, according to the report.

Also in the newsletter, Gingrich expressed his support for the individual mandate in Massachusetts, but only for those making at least $54,000 a year. And while he commended Romney’s effort in building the plan, he acknowledged the bill will likely face “tremendous scrutiny” from those who doubt the law will work.

Gingrich has since admitted he was “wrong” in supporting Romney’s plan and has now become one of its major critics on the campaign trail.

“In retrospect we were wrong because what happens, once you go to a mandate, you have turned so much power over to the government that the politicians rather than the doctors end up defining health care,” Gingrich told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in December. “So it was a mistake.”

Santorum on Saturday attempted to draw the distinction that he is the only one who supports individual freedom.

“Why would the Republican Party – on the issue that won us the 2010 election – nominate either of them who are uniquely unqualified to make the case to the American public,” Santorum said, adding that “they both were for top-down, government-run health care.”

-CNNwp_posts