It won’t be any surprise if Rick Perry and other GOP candidates in Wednesday night’s debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library go after Mitt Romney for signing into law, as Massachusetts governor, a health care bill that many Republicans say is too similar to the one that President Obama pushed to passage. And it will be interesting to see what Romney and his fellow candidates have to say, if anything, about Perry’s stewardship of the health care issue in Texas.
But statistically, here’s one measure by which Perry’s state and Romney’s state are at opposite poles: during the first half of this year, Massachusetts had the lowest percentage of people lacking health coverage at 5.3 percent and Texas had the highest, at 27.2 percent, according to Gallup.
How much light the debates throw on the health care issue and where the Republican hopefuls come out on it remains to be seen.
Over the weekend, the New York Times focused on the three candidates who have been governors — Perry, Romney and Jon Huntsman — and made this observation:
The politics of the primaries have made toxic any consideration of once-conservative concepts like health insurance mandates and marketplace exchanges, because of their association with Mr. Obama’s plan. But in a different day and environment, Mr. Romney in Massachusetts and Mr. Huntsman in Utah embraced those very devices as state solutions, to differing degrees.
Mr. Perry, by contrast, eschewed direct efforts to expand coverage in Texas and cemented its status as the state with the highest rate of people without insurance.
The Times quoted a Perry spokesman as saying, “The governor believes that expanding government-sponsored insurance is not the answer. Nor is requiring people to purchase it. He looks to free-market solutions.”