ROMNEY: For the 8 percent of people [in Massachusetts] who didn't have insurance, we said to them, if you can afford insurance, buy it yourself, any one of the plans out there, you can choose any plan. There's no government plan.
And if you don't want to buy insurance, then you have to help pay for the cost of the state picking up your bill, because under federal law if someone doesn't have insurance, then we have to care for them in the hospitals, give them free care. So we said, no more, no more free riders. We are insisting on personal responsibility.
Either get the insurance or help pay for your care. And that was the conclusion that we reached.... Everyone has a requirement to either buy it or pay the state for the
cost of providing them free care. Because the idea of people getting
something for free when they could afford to care for themselves is
something that we decided in our state was not a good idea.
That's the "individual mandate," plain and simple. As Santorum eventually got around to pointing out.
