Before and After.

"After about a year of looking at data -- and not making much progress -- we had a collective epiphany of sorts, an obvious one, as important observations often are: the people in Massachusetts who didn't have health insurance were, in fact, already receiving health care. Under federal law, hospitals had to stabilize and treat people who arrived at their emergency rooms with acute conditions. And our state's hospitals were offering even more assistance than the federal government required. That meant that someone was already paying for the cost of treating people who didn't have health insurance. If we could get our hands on that money, and therefore redirect it to help the uninsured buy insurance instead and obtain treatment in the way that the vast majority of individuals did -- before acute conditions developed -- the cost of insuring everyone in the state might not be as expensive as I had feared."

Mitt Romney, in "No Apology."

"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance... If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care."


Mitt Romney, last Sunday on 60 Minutes.