Jules Crittenden calls it Mitt Romney’s health-care problem, and he doesn’t mean a nagging cold.  Romney appeared on Fox News Sunday to talk about his new book, but Chris Wallace probed Romney’s response to criticisms mounting over his expansive health-care system in Massachusetts. That plan imposed mandates on businesses and individuals, setting minimum insurance-coverage standards, and subsidies — which looks a lot like the ObamaCare proposal floating in Congress.

The result has been skyrocketing premiums and massive cost overruns, one of the main arguments against the ObamaCare approach:On the surface, it would seem that the abortion coverage in RomneyCare would be the big problem. However, as the Boston Herald reports, Romney had little choice in that provision:

The bigger problem is the enormous cost of RomneyCare. In this interview, Romney said that he didn’t raise taxes to pay for the plan, but the cost overruns will force Massachusetts to either do so now or significantly alter the program:Romney wants to differentiate his approach to that of ObamaCare by noting that his plan was on the state level, not federal.

That’s true, but also a non-sequitur. As the Herald notes, it uses mainly the same approach that ObamaCare uses in imposing more government control over the health-care sector. Like ObamaCare will, Massachusetts has only succeeded in increasing costs, both to the government and to individuals.

While the White House acknowledges using the Massachusetts plan as a model for their own general suggestions on health-care reform, their opponents have used Massachusetts much more specifically as an argument against them. And Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts speaks volumes about how Bay State voters feel about government-controlled health care.

Romney would be better off jettisoning his support of the plan, perhaps chalking it up to bad implementation. Arguing that following a similar plan on a federal level is objectionable merely because of federalism isn’t going to work if Romney wants to challenge for the GOP nomination to run against Obama in 2012. The nation is coming around to the realization that government intervention creates more problems than it solves, and that free-market reform has the best chance of succeeding.

Romney’s continued insistence on supporting a government intervention through some nuanced points on which level mandates what to whom is a losing argument.Would Romney benefit by saying instead, “Look, I tried working with the Democrats on their terms, and this turned out to be a big mistake”?  I think it would put him more in the mainstream of where Americans want to take health-care reform now.  It would work better than continuing to defend MassCare.