Newt Gingrich voiced enthusiasm for Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care law when it was passed five years ago, the same plan he has been denouncing over the past few months as he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination.
“The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system,” said an April 2006 newsletter published by Gingrich’s former consulting company, the Center for Health Transformation.
The two-page “Newt Notes” analysis, found online by The Wall Street Journal even though it no longer appears on the center’s website, continued, “We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100 percent insurance coverage for all Americans.”
The earlier bullish comments about the Romney health care plan are another potential embarrassment for Gingrich, who is leading Romney in most national polls for the GOP nomination.
But with a week to go before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, Gingrich has slipped to third place in that state behind Texas Rep. Ron Paul and Romney. On other issues including climate change and mortgage giant Freddie Mac, Gingrich has struggled to reconcile his stance as a conservative with his long history of policy positions that sometimes run counter to that.
Gingrich’s rise to the top of the field has come in part from his bashing Romney for engineering a state health care expansion that became a model for President Barack Obama’s 2010 health law. “Your plan essentially is one more big-government, bureaucratic, high-cost system,” Gingrich told Romney during an October debate in Las Vegas. He said Romney was trying to solve Massachusetts’ health care problems “from the top down.”
R.C. Hammond, a spokesman for Gingrich, said the April 2006 essay shouldn’t be read as an endorsement of Romney’s health plan. He noted that it raised several questions about the Massachusetts effort, including whether the plan would work in the state. “Being critical … isn’t endorsing it,” he said.
Hammond said the Newt Notes essay wasn’t written by Gingrich himself. The Journal was able to view a copy using a web search engine that archives old and even deleted versions of web pages.
Click here to read more on this story from The Wall Street Journal.
(Source: Fox News)
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4 Responses
“We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100 percent insurance coverage for all Americans.”
One could say he didn’t mean mandatory socialized medicine. Rather it could mean that the govt would make all healthcare tax deductible.
No. 1 writes, in part: “One could say he didn’t mean mandatory socialized medicine.”
One could say anything, but that does not make it TRUE. Why not let Perfesser Gingrich say whatever he wants to say, and evaluate his fitness for the Republican nomination for president by what he says, what he has said, what he does, and has done, instead of spinning his words for him.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the press as well as #2 were as concerned about Obama as they are about the Republicans who are running. Obama has gotten a free pass!
No. 3: What is it that the press and I should be saying about President Obama: that he
is not a Muslim,
was born in Hawaii,
attended and excelled at an elite law school,
lived in the same neighborhood as a formerly infamous and now little-known 60’s radical,
formerly attended a church with a black-liberation preacher,
pushed through a significant (though, in my opinion, insufficient) health care reform law,
dodged the draft for the Vietnam war (oh, wait, that was Cheney, Gingrich and a few other chickenhawks),
could not hunt down Osama bin Laden (oh, wait, that was GHBush and his boss, Cheney),
that his wife wants us to eat our vegetables?
What are the awful truths about President Obama that I and my fellow travellers in the press are concealing from you and the other 309,999,999 American people? Is it possible that so much of the negative information about President Obama – his foreigh birth, his hatred of America, his communist socialism and his socialist communism – has been vetted and found to be incredibly incredible and unbelievably unbelievable? Share with us, if you can, the protocols of the puppetmasters of Barack Hussein Obama?