Texas Gov. Rick Perry tried to score a few points on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's health care reforms during Tuesday's The Washington Post/Bloomberg Republican presidential debate, but the plan quickly backfired.
"Gov. Romney, your chief economic advisor, Glenn Hubbard, who you know well -- he said that Romneycare was Obamacare," Perry charged. "And Romneycare has driven the cost of small business insurance premiums up by 14 percent over the national average in Massachusetts. So, my question for you would be, how would you respond to his criticism of your signature legislative achievement?"
"I'm proud of the fact that we took on a major problem in our state," Romney argued. "We had a lot of kids without insurance, a lot of adults without insurance, but it added up to about eight percent of our population. And we said, 'You know what, we want to find a way to get those folks insured but we don't change anything for the 92 percent of people that already have insurance.' And so our plan dealt with those eight percent, not the 92."
"I'll tell you this though, we have the lowest number of kids as a percentage of any state in America. You have the highest... We have less than one percent of our kids that are uninsured. You have a million kids uninsured in Texas. A million kids."
