Mitt Romney on Obamacare in 2010: Let’s “repeal the bad and keep the good”

(By Tina Korbe, Hot Air) - Just when it seems every last shred of evidence 'against' a candidate has surfaced, a new iteration of a troublesome past position will appear. This will just fuel those commenters who’re convinced I’m anti-Mitt, but it has to be posted. (I’d repeat again that I’m genuinely undecided but that would just feed those who’re convinced I have a secret bias in favor of a particular candidate that I refuse to reveal.)

When Obamacare passed in 2010, Mitt Romney didn’t exactly have the same reaction as, say, Tea Party protesters. He was less immediately concerned with what the law represented — that is, a massive overreach by the federal government, a total takeover of health care — than he was with the specifics of the law, with the question of whether they would work. And, on several occasions, he went on record in support of the individual mandate — the very mandate that might now be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States.

We already knew that Mitt Romney signed Romneycare — with its individual law and its taxpayer-subsidy-funded premium exchange — into law at the state level. If I had stopped to think about it, I might even have remembered that Romney’s original idea about Obamacare was to “repeal its worst aspects.” But that phrase — “repeal its worst aspects” — could be construed to mean Romney still thought the entire law was “bad.”