Get out your pens and papers, boys and girls, it’s time to take a quiz. Read the following ten statements and try to guess who said it!
- “First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties… or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages “free riders” to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others.”
- “This doesn’t cost the government a single dollar. Second, we helped pay for our new program by ending an old one — something government should do more often. The federal government sends an estimated $42 billion to hospitals that care for the poor: Use those funds instead to help the poor buy private insurance, as we did.”
- “I like mandates.”
- ‘Look, if people can afford to buy it, either buy the insurance or pay your own way. ”
- “Don’t be free riders and pass the cost of health care on to everybody else.”
- “This Republican is proud to be the first governor to insure all his state’s citizens.”
- “I’m not going to change my positions by virtue of being in a presidential campaign. What we did [health care] was right for the people of Massachusetts.”
- Universal health care will help “hundreds of thousands of people…have healthier and happier lives.”
- Either the individual pays or the taxpayers pay. A free ride on government is not libertarian.”
- “An uninsured libertarian might counter that he could refuse the free care, but under law, that is impossible—and inhumane.”
The person who made each and every statement above is none other than this dapper and finely coiffed individual:
Otherwise known as former Massachusetts I-signed-a-universal-healthcare-bill-and-liked-it governor GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
All quotes verbatim from USA Today, ABC News, WSJ, and WSJ.
[Image of RMoney via Gage Skidmore’s Flickr]
