Last week, The Onion (a satirical magazine) wrote that Mitt Romney was “haunted by past of trying to help uninsured sick people.” Like any good satire, it has the bite of truth. In the strange world of American politics, Mitt Romney is “haunted” by his health care past—not so much because voters or pundits know all that much about Massachusetts, but because they hate ObamaCare so much that anything that faintly smells like it (no matter the contextual differences) is immediately and angrily rejected. Massachusetts’ health care isn’t perfect, as Governor Romney freely admits, but it was and is a serious and creative effort designed to address the unique needs of the state he governed.

These two sentences sum it up:

“In Massachusetts, Mitt Romney balanced the budget then reached across the aisle to create a popular health reform program that was specifically designed for the unique needs of his state. Barack Obama, on the other hand, created a huge new entitlement program in an era of record deficits by ramming an unconstitutional, one-size-fits-all mandate through a reluctant congress and over the expressed objections of a majority of the American people.”