Hat tip to the guys at Verum Serum, who put this thing together.

At the debate tonight, Mitt Romney flopped around a good bit about Romneycare and why it doesn’t mean he won’t get rid of Obamacare. But the problem is, Romney’s solution – he says – is to sign an executive order giving everybody a waiver from Obamacare.

Watch the video, then we’ll talk about this some more.

The thing is, waivers won’t work. Obamacare has billions and billions of dollars in built-in spending and a blob-like federal bureaucracy set to spring up in Washington. And issuing waivers to the states doesn’t mean they’ll take them – what if they say they want Obamacare? Then the states which don’t want it might well have to subsidize the ones that do.

Meanwhile, you’re still starving Medicare and you’re still killing private health insurance.

You need LEGISLATION to kill Obamacare. You need a president who’s committed to a full repeal of it.

Is Romney? Maybe. But while he says Obamacare is awful because it’s a federal plan, his talking about waivers combined with Romneycare sounds an awful lot like “hey, let’s let the states who want to have Obamacare have it – because that’s states’ rights, right?”

Which is unacceptable.

This program has to be ripped out of the federal code root and branch. It needs to be completely repealed line by line – regardless of whether the GOP can come up with something else to replace it. Because if it isn’t, federal law which forbids insurance companies from paying out less than 85 percent of their premium revenues on claims will put every single one of them out of business – or at least out of the health-care market – within five years.

And then nobody will be able to get health insurance, and at that point there is no political option other than to have the government take the industry over.

None of this is particularly new ground. But Romney has failed to establish a correct position on the principles of the issue. He’s made it clear that he thinks it’s OK for the government to force you to buy something, so long as it’s the state government doing it, and he hasn’t specifically addressed Obamacare’s planned destruction of the private insurance market.

Is Perry better on Obamacare? He hasn’t made as big a deal out of it as some of the more veteran GOP 2012 hopefuls have, but his record in Texas is the opposite of Romney’s. He even took some crap from Chris Wallace tonight on the fact that it’s harder to get on Medicaid in Texas than in other states, which to me sounds like more of a feature than a bug – particularly given that Texas has over a million illegal immigrants who’d probably love to get on Medicaid if it wasn’t policed as well as it is.

But he hasn’t made a big emphasis out of getting Obamacare repealed like Michele Bachmann has, which is the strongest suit of her entire campaign.

Still, Perry seems a lot safer on this issue than Romney is.

But given that you’ll need 60 senators for a total repeal through legislation, we’re still probably dependent on the Supreme Court to keep this thing from ending up as the National Health Service.