Enlarge Win McNamee\/Boston Globe via Getty Images <\/p>\n
President Obama is applauded after signing the health care overhaul during a ceremony in the White House on March 23, 2010. Then-Gov. Mitt Romney signs a Massachusetts health care overhaul at Faneuil Hall in Boston on April 12, 2006. <\/p>\n
President Obama is applauded after signing the health care overhaul during a ceremony in the White House on March 23, 2010. Then-Gov. Mitt Romney signs a Massachusetts health care overhaul at Faneuil Hall in Boston on April 12, 2006. <\/p>\n
From now until November, President Obama and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney will emphasize their differences. But the two men's lives actually coincide in a striking number of ways. In this installment of NPR's \"Parallel Lives\" series, a look at one of those similarities: They both signed health care overhaul laws based on an individual mandate. <\/p>\n
Health care has become one of the starkest contrasts between President Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign. And that's surprising, given that once upon a time they both came up with similar plans to fix the system. <\/p>\n
Stuart Altman, a professor of health policy at Brandeis University, says the two men once occupied the same political space on health care. <\/p>\n
\"I would define Obama as a moderate liberal and Romney as a moderate conservative. ... Both of them came to the same conclusion,\" he says. They decided what was needed was a system \"built as much as possible on the existing health insurance system.\" <\/p>\n
Both men embraced what was considered to be mainstream health care policy thinking: maintain the employer-provided system but get everyone covered through an individual mandate a requirement to buy insurance. <\/p>\n
From Victory To Problem <\/p>\n
Romney went first. In 2006, as Massachusetts' governor, he talked about the state's mandate in decidedly nonideological terms: \"We're going to say, folks, if you can afford health care, then gosh, you'd better go get it; otherwise, you're just passing on your expenses to someone else. That's not Republican; that's not Democratic; that's not libertarian; that's just wrong.\" <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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Obama, Romney On Health Care: So Close, Yet So Far<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Enlarge Win McNamee\/Boston Globe via Getty Images President Obama is applauded after signing the health care overhaul during a ceremony in the White House on March 23, 2010. Then-Gov. Mitt Romney signs a Massachusetts health care overhaul at Faneuil Hall in Boston on April 12, 2006 Continue reading