Romney's Stance on Health Care?
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening, everyone. It's 10:00 here on the East Coast. And we begin tonight "Keeping Them Honest" on the campaign trail, President Obama and Mitt Romney in as close as you can get to a preview of next week's first debate. Each appeared on "60 Minutes." Mr. Obama made news for what some are calling a gaffe, and Romney certainly did, and we will talk about that shortly. First, though, Mr. Romney's big headline getter on health care.</s>QUESTION: Does the government have responsible to provide health care to the 50 million Americans who don't have it today?</s>MITT ROMNEY (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance. People -- 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.</s>QUESTION: That's the most expensive way to do it, in the emergency room.</s>ROMNEY: Again, different states have different ways of doing that. Some provide that care through clinics, some provide the care through emergency rooms. In my state we found a solution that worked for my state. But I wouldn't take what we did in Massachusetts and say to Texas, you have to take the Massachusetts model.</s>COOPER: He points to the emergency room as a viable alternative for the uninsured, yet that's precisely the expensive alternative that his Massachusetts model and the president's model try to eliminate by providing universal coverage. That's President Obama's rationale for health care reform now and it was Mitt Romney's rationale for his own plan back in 2010. Here he is back then on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."</s>QUESTION: You believe in universal coverage?</s>ROMNEY: Oh, sure. Look, it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they're people who have sufficient means to pay their own way.</s>COOPER: That was 2010, and as you can see this clip from three years before, what Mitt Romney says about health care seems to depend on who's asking him about it. Here's what he said in 2007 to Glenn Beck.</s>ROMNEY: Actually, what we have right now is the road to socialism. What we have right now in health care is creeping socialism with more and more people going on Medicaid and Medicare, and those who don't have insurance, when they show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is.</s>COOPER: Three occasions, over five years, three very different takes on health care. As we said, Mr. Obama made news as well. Joining us tonight to talk about it, Paul Begala, advising the leading pro-Obama super PAC. Also Republican strategist Alex Castellanos. Paul, even though it seems like Romney has pretty much been all over the map when it comes to people without insurance in turning to the emergency room for basic care, does a flip-flop or change in position on an issue like this really resonate with voters?</s>PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I actually have never been one as a Democratic strategist and as you know I advise the super PAC that's trying to defeat Governor Romney and reelect the president, so I have a dog in this hunt. We never attacked him for the flip- flopping not because we think he's not, but because we think it's more important to show the damage he would do to the middle class. I think that's the problem here. Once again he seemed to be really out of touch, really callous about people who don't have health insurance, who might have a heart attack and die. He says, well, they don't die in their apartment. Well, actually, they do sometimes, Governor. There was a Harvard -- I think it was Harvard -- might have been Kaiser -- study that said 40,000 Americans a year die because they don't have health insurance. That's the problem, is he looks once again like he's not on the side of middle class people.</s>COOPER: Alex, does he seem out of touch on this issue?</s>ALEX CASTELLANOS, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Oh, I don't think so. I think -- first of all, when you have lost as many races as I have, I have ended up in a lot of emergency rooms.</s>CASTELLANOS: And there is a problem with American health care, and everyone will acknowledge it, and that is that doctors in America don't tell anybody no. Hospitals are required by law not to tell anybody no. So we do provide care, but there are some people out there who do split their pills in half because they can't afford it. There are some people out there who don't go to get care because they feel responsible to pay for it and they know they can't. But I think Romney's point here was that we have a health care system that is providing a lot of care that we are not paying for, and that's what he was addressing.</s>COOPER: Paul, another sound bite from "60 Minutes" last night, something the president said the Romney campaign has been all over today. Let's play what the president said.</s>BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road. There will probably be some times where we bump up against some of these countries and have strong disagreements, but I do think that over the long term, we're more likely to get a Middle East and North Africa that is more peaceful, more prosperous and more aligned with our interests.</s>COOPER: Now, Mitt Romney today has been all over the phrase bumps in the road. Was that a poor choice in words on the president's part as Governor Romney is saying? Because does it sounds like he's downplaying thousands of deaths in Syria, the assassination, the killing of our ambassador and three others?</s>BEGALA: I think that's the risk that comes with this president's extraordinarily low blood pressure. He's a very cool customer. And there's a lot of good in that, though. You don't want a president talking about a international crisis who looks like a hothead or goes off half-cocked. I think part of why Governor Romney looked bad responding to the tragedy in Benghazi is he seemed like he was too political and too opportunistic. It could be here that the president was a little too cool. I don't think in his defense for a minute he would say that the murder of an ambassador and other American personnel, much less all the other folks who have died in that region, is just a bump in the road. I think what he's trying to do is show everybody that we're on this, the United States is doing well, and, you know, I think that's a kind of typical no-drama Obama response.</s>COOPER: Alex, is that what it is, just the cool head of the president?</s>CASTELLANOS: I think there's something to that, but I think there's also a little more, and that is that this president's great strength is his intellect. He lives inside his head and his ideas. And part of it is he doesn't really feel your pain like Paul's former boss, Bill Clinton, but he can memorize a study about it, you know. People are distant from this president. There's a certain sense of arrogance to this White House that they're just detached from it and I think that's a vulnerability. We have two elite candidates running for president. We have an academic elite, Barack Obama, running against financial elite. So the middle class is up for grabs here.</s>COOPER: Alex, I want to ask you about something I saw you tweet over the weekend. You said, "When I see Romney, he looks like a candidate. When I see Obama, he looks like a president. This should not be hard to fix, so fix it." What do you mean? Wasn't one of the governor's big selling points during the primary season the idea that he did look presidential?</s>CASTELLANOS: You know, as a candidate -- as the person himself, yes, I think Mitt Romney looks very presidential but he's out there on the trail now and every time I turn on my TV, it's the same political rally with Paul Ryan and the same crowd around him state after state after state, and it looks like a political beauty pageant. It looks like politics, not like governing. You don't want to run for president looking like a candidate. You want to run for president looking like a president. And I think doing some more important things, for example, go where the problem is, Mitt Romney, go to an inner city and find out what's happened to the American family that's falling apart. Go where the problem is. Go to an unemployment line, talk to some people, but quit having political events.</s>COOPER: Alex Castellanos, Paul Begala, thank you. Let us know what you think. We're on Facebook or follow me on Twitter @AndersonCooper. I will be tweeting tonight. Up next, latest developments on Libya and how some of the story came to light.