“I don’t want to live in a world where we have Obamacare telling us which insurance we have to have, which doctor we can have, which hospital we go to,” Romney said at the press conference. “I believe in the setting as I described this morning where people are able to choose their own doctor, choose their own insurance company. If they don’t like their insurance company or their provider, they can get rid of it.”
Romney also pushed back against Newt Gingrich, who has sharpened his attacks on Romney’s business background at Bain Capital.
“Gee, I thought he apologized for going after my record at Bain, wasn’t that just a couple weeks ago?”
Romney said. “So you apologize for it and now he’s decided to make it a centerpiece?”
“Free enterprise will be on trial,” he added. “I thought it was going to come from the Democrats and the left. But instead it’s coming from Speaker Gingrich and apparently others. You know, that’s just part of the process. I have broad shoulders and I’m happy to describe my experience in the private economy.”
Romney appeared slightly irked when asked how he could relate to average workers when he was a successful businessman, earning degrees from Harvard, and growing up the son of a Michigan governor.
“You know, if you think that I should spend my entire campaign carefully choosing how everything I say relates to people, as opposed to saying my own experience and telling my own experience, then that would make me a very different person than I am,” Romney said. “I’ll tell my experiences in life, and I realize they’re not the same as everybody else I speak with. But I’m going to tell you about myself.”
“If people like that, great,” he added. “If they want President Obama and the loss of 2 million jobs, a decline of median income in America by 10 percent, and people looking at very difficult prospects going forward, they can choose President Obama.”
Romney this afternoon also elaborated on a comment he made yesterday, when he said that he knew what it was like to fear a pink slip.
“As you probably know in your profession, you never quite know what’s going to happen,” Romney said. “I think people imagine that I came in at the top of Bain & Company, the consulting firm, or the Boston Consulting Group — I started at the bottom.”
“I came out of school and I got an entry level position like the other people that were freshly-minted MBAs,” he added. “You wonder, when you don’t do so well, whether you’re going to be able to hang onto your job and you wonder if the enterprise gets in trouble, you know, will you be one of those that’s laid off.”
