But this is what Romney has said since his first remarks on health care in this campaign, and what basically every conservative who has had much to say about health-care reform has said since well before Obamacare. For as long as Romney has had a campaign web site with a section on health care, for instance, it has listed among the elements of his proposal to replace Obamacare “Prevent discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage.” And Romney has talked about this point himself before too, as Katrina notes below. His reference in all these instances to protecting people who are continuously insured also tells us that he’s not talking about a system that would involve an individual mandate to work, but rather one that would use the protection of those with continuous insurance (combined with reforms of the tax code and other steps to make it possible for people to remain continuously insured) as a powerful incentive for the young and healthy to obtain insurance.

This kind of mechanism, using high-risk pools combined with prohibitions on pre-existing condition exclusions for the continuously insured, has been part of just about every conservative health-care proposal in recent years, including John McCain’s in 2008, the Ryan-Coburn alternative to Obamacare, and the congressional Republicans’ “Pledge to America” before the 2010 elections (as well as older proposals in the Bush years). The basic structure of these different proposals is very similar, and is based on many years of conservative policy proposals along these lines—here’s a great detailed overview of how this would work.