You Can’t Say It Any Better Than This (Updates: Transcript; an ObamaCare Hire from RomneyCare; Maggie’s Farm; Powerline)

The Cato Institute (HT Right Ohio and an e-mail I received at about the same time) shows that ObamaCare is RomneyCare 2.0, and simultaneously demonstrates why a Romney nomination for president by the GOP in 2012 is a death wish:

Man up, Mitt, and get out.

____________________________________________________

UPDATE: A full transcript, with a few links added –

David Boaz, Executive Vice President at Cato Institute: For the past year, conservatives have been campaigning against Obama’s health are plan.

Now they want to repeal it, they want file lawsuits to overturn it in the courts. And yet their front-running presidential candidate is Mitt Romney, who authored a very similar plan when he was governor of Massachusetts.

He was kind of quiet during 2009. Now in 2010 he’s out there putting himself forward to be the leader of the Republican Party. And in particular, he’s campaigning against ObamaCare. But as President Obama himself has pointed out, Romney is the guy who created the prototype for ObamaCare.

Michael F. Cannon, Director of Health Care Policy Studies at Cato: When you run down the list of the elements in the Obama plan and the Romney plan, they are all identical: the individual mandate, the requirement that insurance’s cover sick people at the same premiums as everyone else. The creation of a new government bureaucracy called an exchange that regulates health insurance. The subsidies to help people purchase private health insurance and comply with that mandate. The expansion of new government programs.

Romney (on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor): It’s very different than ObamaCare in a couple of important ways.

Cannon: In every important respect the Obama plan and the Romney plan are identical.

Boaz: President Obama rammed a health care bill through Congress on a straight party-line vote. No Republican supporters. But he still likes this image of himself as bipartisan. So he’s been going around saying, “Hey, I got some ideas from the Heritage Foundation, I got a lot of ideas from Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts.”

And that’s something Romney is trying to out from under. Romney doesn’t want Republicans to think that he provided the model for ObamaCare. And a lot of times, Obama exaggerates this bipartisan idea. But in this particular case, Obama’s got a point.

RomneyCare did model a lot of the ideas that ended up being the framework for Obama’s plan. And that’s the connection Romney doesn’t want people to see.

Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, March 22, 2010: This legislation looks an awful lot like what happened in Massachusetts, and I’m sure Governor Romney hates every time I say that.

Boaz: How can he lead the charge against a health care plan that is modeled on his own? How can he go around denouncing a government takeover and an intrusion into people’s rights when he authored a very similar plan?

Romney (on what appears to be Larry King’s CNN show): I know some people say, “gee your Massachusetts health care plan isn’t conservative.” I say, “Oh yes it is.”

Boaz: Well he’s getting a lot of flak from conservatives who don’t think an individual mandate sounds like the limited government that they thought conservatives believe in. So he’s come out saying, “Well it’s a matter of personal responsibility and that’s a bedrock conservative principle.”

Romney (on CNN’s Larry King show): No more free riders. People have to take personal responsibility.

Romney (in a Heritage Foundation speech on January 6, 2006): You may call this an individual mandate. I don’t. I call it the personal responsibility principle. (Note: A defense from Heritage of what was in the works in Massachusetts in early 2006 is here — Ed.)

Boaz: His concept of responsibility, which is also President Obama’s concept, is that the government decides what you have to do, like you must buy health insurance, and then the government will decide what benefits you get.

Other people think personal responsibility means (that) you make the decisions about your life, and you accept the consequences of your decisions.

Cannon: Both the Romney plan and the Obama plan are essentially a government takeover of the health care sector of the economy. You can make a valid argument that only the state government should be able to do that and not the federal government.

Romney (on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor): States should be able to solve state problems.

Cannon: But if you’re making that argument to people who are opposed to any government takeover of health insurance, they’re probably not going to find that persuasive.

Boaz: Daniel Gross wrote a column in Newsweek saying that Obama needs a really smart guy to run his health care plan. He said he needs somebody with strong management experience, somebody who doesn’t have a job right, now, and somebody who has experience implementing government-mandate, insurance-exchange health care plan.

And who is that person but Mitt Romney?

Who indeed?

UPDATE 2 — From the “What further evidence do you need?” Department:

Romney’s Health Care Administrator Moves to ObamaCare

Jon Kingsdale was appointed by Romney in 2006 to run the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, which operates the state exchange that serves as a health insurance marketplace for Massachusetts citizens. Kingsdale announced Thursday that he is stepping down from that position to pursue opportunities in implementing the national reforms, according to reports.

The national health care legislation requires all states to establish exchanges like the one in Massachusetts. And like the Massachusetts plan, the new law requires everyone to purchase health insurance either through the exchanges or by some other means.

“We should all feel very proud of having created the model for national health reform,” Kingsdale wrote in his resignation letter, the Washington Post reports. “The power of the Bay State’s example is enormously consequential. I believe that national reform would not have happened without it.”

Thanks, Mitt (/sarc).

UPDATE 3: Maggie’s Farm links and posts a Galen Institute item that appeared in a mid-March edition of the Wall Street Journal detailing how poorly RomneyCare is working out in the Bay State.

UPDATE 4: The bottom line, from Scott at Powerline –

Suffice it to say that Governor Romney is probably not the man to lead the resistance to Obamaism. If he isn’t yet toast, I can’t help but think he should be.

Regarding a Romney candidacy (not Romney himself, of course):  Burn baby burn.