At least President Romney will protect us from "socialized" (or--gasp!--"European") health-care systems. The system will just be: Be rich or die!

"In [Hillary Clinton's health-care] plan we have government insurance instead of private insurance. In her plan it's crafted by Washington; it should be crafted by the states. In her plan, we have government Washington-managed health care. Instead, we should rely on private markets to guide health care. And in her plan, you see increased taxes. The burden should not be raised on the American people."
--former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, at a press conference held without the hospital's permission outside New York's St. Vincent Hospital, before Senator Clinton's health-care plan was even released

In fact, as Lisa Wangsness points out in today's Boston Globe: "Key elements of Hillary Clinton's healthcare proposal are strikingly similar to the tenets of the health overhaul that Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts last year. But you would never guess it from the broadsides he hurled yesterday against what he called 'Hillarycare 2.0' and described as 'a European-style socialized medicine plan.'

Wangsness reports:

[T]he central premise of Clinton's plan - an "individual mandate" requiring that every American have health insurance - is precisely what Romney proposed in the Bay State, in what was seen as a bold approach to attaining universal coverage. The idea became a pillar of the law, which he signed in April 2006.

Clinton's plan and the Massachusetts law also share a guiding principle: Build on the existing employer-based private healthcare system, instead of replacing it with a government-run system.

"What Hillary proposed is in many ways the Massachusetts plan gone national, and I think that's great," said MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber, an early adviser to Romney on the healthcare reform law who has consulted with all the major Democratic presidential candidates. "We are the shot fired around the world again - there's a whole new movement in healthcare started by what we did here. And rather than claiming credit for it, Romney's running away from it."

While the law is Romney's signature achievement as governor, on the campaign trail he has soft-pedaled or avoided mentioning elements of the law that might trouble conservative audiences, such as the extent of state government's involvement.

cartoon by Mick Stevens, in the Sept. 24 New Yorker