Romney keeps hacking at Obamacare's shadow limb

Jonathan Chait has helped me understand Romney's signature lie about Obamacare, repeated throughout the debates. The lie completes a false contrast: while Romneycare is a private, market-based solution, Obamacare is a government takeover. Here's the Jan. 26 iteration:

I didn’t say I’m in favor of top- down government-run health care, 92 percent of the people in my state had insurance before our plan went in place. And nothing changes for them. They own the same private insurance they had before.

And for the 8 percent of people 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....


I don’t like the Obama plan... He wasn’t interested in the 8 percent of the people that were uninsured. He was concerned about the 100 percent of the people of the country.  “Obama-care” takes over health care for the American people.

For months I've wondered out of what slender thread of reality Romney spun the lie that the ACA "takes over health care" in a way that the Massachusetts coverage plan does not. The best I could come up with was the Independent Payment  Advisory Board, which can recommend reimbursement reductions in Medicare -- with an overlay of the death panel hysteria that Bachmann, Palin et al imposed on that modest instrument of cost control. He could also be referring to national standards for health plan coverage -- but Romneycare imposes such standards too, and in any case, HHS has largely empowered the states to set them.

Now I know what Romney has been swinging at with this "government takeover" bludgeon. It's the ACA's shadow limb: the public option.