Mitt Romney’s strange counting of pages to distinguish ‘Romneycare’ from ‘Obamacare’

Glenn Kessler
WashPost

(Charlie Neibergall/AP) “If I become president, I will repeal ‘Obamacare.’ My bill was 70 pages. His bill is 2,700 pages. In those extra 2,630 pages he’s doing a lot of stuff that is just devastating to the health care system in this country. He’s wrong.” -- Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), May 31, 2011

Mitt Romney has a problem—the sweeping universal health care bill he signed into law five years ago. President Obama has cited “Romneycare” as a model for his own health care law, making it a political albatross for the former Massachusetts governor in the contest to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.

So Romney has tried his best to emphasize that the law he signed was different and unique to Massachusetts and should not have been considered a template for the rest of the country. Nevertheless, our friends at PolitiFact.com have put together a clever quiz that demonstrates just how difficult it is to tell the difference between the two laws.

This week on NBC’s “Today” show, Romney asserted that the difference was evident in the sheer bulk of the bills — a mere “70 pages” for his law and a behemoth “2,700 pages” for the president’s law. This is an old politician’s trick — lots of pages suggest something nefarious is going on — but we decided to dig deeper and see whether this is even a relevant apples-to-apples comparison.

(Continued here.)