Romney accuses President of ‘fundamental dishonesty’ over failure for people to be able to keep existing health plans under Obamacare
Romney told NBC’s Meet The Press that the President had ‘put in peril the whole foundation of his second term’
While Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said taken the state ‘two years to get its website right’
Former Republican Presidential
nominee Mitt Romney has accused President Obama of ‘fundamental
dishonesty’ over the Affordable Care Act.
Romney
said the President has ‘put in peril the whole foundation of his second
term’ after repeatedly promising that people could keep their
healthcare coverage plans if they wanted too - a statement which this
week was discovered to be false.
‘He told people they could keep their insurance, and that was not the truth,’ Romney told NBC's Meet The Press.
His harsh comments follow a recent
speech by the President in which he attempted to defuse some of the
growing criticism surrounding the enrollment process by drawing
comparisons with the health reform law that Romney had championed as
Massachusetts governor.
‘The president failed to learn the lesson that came from the experience of Massachusetts,’ said Romney. He said that state’s efforts had showed the merits of avoiding a ‘one-size-fits-all plan.’
‘States should be able to craft their own plans,’ said Romney. He was followed on Meet The Press by current Massachusetts Governor - and Democrat - Deval Patrick.
He
insisted that there were lessons to be gleaned from his state’s
experience and that it hadn’t been an immediate success either.
‘It took us two years to get our
website right in Massachusetts,’ said Patrick. But now the state has
near-universal insurance coverage and broad popular support for the
program, he said.
Responding
to Romney’s charges about people being forced to change their insurance
plans, Patrick said in many cases that coverage was flawed to begin
with.
'If you have the
kind of health care that disappears when you need it most, the
Affordable Care Act says that has to end,' Patrick said.
The federal HealthCare.gov Web site was down overnight Saturday and into Sunday, the latest in a continuing string of problems.
Dan Pfeiffer, a top White House adviser, said the system can be fixed by the end of November.
'There’s no question we have to get this done by the end of this month,' he said on ABC’s This Week.
Pfeiffer acknowledged that enrollment numbers to be released later this month 'are not going to be what we want them to be.'
'The
website hasn’t worked the way we want it to work. But we take
responsibility for that, take responsibility for the errors, take
responsibility for fixing it,' he said.
'And if we get the website working as expected we do by the end of this month, then I think we’re going to be in a good place.'
The
enrollment process for uninsured people under the Affordable Care Act
has been plagued by software and data entry problems which led Health
and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to offer an apology to a
House committee in testimony.
Sebelius
called the enrollment software problems a 'debacle' and 'a miserably
frustrating experience for way too many Americans.'