To Robbins, Edwards Is the Star

-- Matthew Mosk

A UNIVERSAL PROPOSAL

Romney Offers Health-Care Plan

JOHNSTON, Iowa -- The latest candidate promising universal health care to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire: Mitt Romney.

While the Democratic candidates have dueled for months over whose plan is most "universal," the GOP candidates have largely stayed away from that fray.

Now, as the caucuses near and Republican voters in the early states keep asking the candidates about their prescription for health care, Romney pledged at a house party Wednesday to get everyone in the country health insurance within four years if Congress passed his plan.

When he announced his health-care plan in August, the former Massachusetts governor didn't emphasize its universality, and experts doubt his proposal would expand health insurance to the 47 million Americans who don't have it because he does not include new monies to finance the program.

Earlier this year, Romney put distance between himself and the 2006 Massachusetts law that seeks to create universal health care in that state. Romney had worked hard on the provision and signed it in a lavish ceremony, but some of the elements, such as requiring people to get insurance or face a fine, are not popular among the conservative activists he has been courting.

But on Wednesday, he returned to that Massachusetts example, bragging that more than two-thirds of the uninsured there are now covered. As president, "I'll battle to get that done in every state in the country," he said.

-- Perry Bacon Jr.