When former Sen. Rick Santorum accused Mitt Romney of having
signed a health care overhaul virtually identitical to ObamaCare,
Romney responded with a lengthy defense of the plan he signed as
governor of Massachusetts. 

I’ve noted
the many similarities
between the two plans before. But the resemblance extends beyond
the plans themselves: Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress noticed how
much Mitt Romney’s defense of RomneyCare last night resembled
President Obama’s defense of ObamaCare, and
put together the following video to highlight the
similarities:

This isn’t even a complete compilation of the similarities.
During last night’s debate, Romney also defended
his plan from charges that it resembled ObamaCare by arguing that
in Massachusetts, “there’s no government plan.” He’s
used this line before, but it’s never helped distinguish
Romney’s health overhaul from Obama’s: There’s no “government plan”
in ObamaCare either, or at least no more of one than there is in
RomneyCare. Both ObamaCare and RomneyCare rely on a regulated
market and an expansion of Medicaid. Nor is Romney the only one to
point this out in order to defend the structure both plans share:
In his
State of the Union address earlier this week, President Obama
touted the fact that “our health care law relies on a reformed
private market, not a government program.”

In the end, Romney only ended up reinforcing the similarities
between his plan and President Obama’s. It’s hard to make a
convincing case that the RomneyCare is somehow dramatically
different from ObamaCare while relying on virtually the same
arguments employed by ObamaCare’s most prominent
defender. 

Granted, this isn’t exactly a new thing for Romney. In May of
last year, he gave a major speech defending RomneyCare and
attacking the president’s plan. But Romney’s big defense of his own
plan turned out to be virtually
indistinguishable from a defense of ObamaCare.