slideshow

Conservative Senator Jim DeMint says he would not consider backing Mitt Romney again unless he renounces the healthcare bill he passed while governor of Massachusetts.

DeMint endorsed Romney over McCain in 2008.  However, that probably won’t happen this time around.  From The Hill:

DeMint told The Hill that he hadn't decided who he would endorse in the 2012 Republican presidential primary and said that Romney wasn't entirely to blame for the elements of the Massachusetts healthcare plan that conservatives now deplore. 



DeMint said:

One of the reasons I endorsed Romney is his attempts to make private health insurance available at affordable prices. He set the goal that all folks in Massachusetts would have affordable health insurance. By the time it got through the Democratic state legislature, it had all these mandates on it, requirements about what kind of policies would be bought — the same thing that happened up here — instead of getting people insured, it was a government takeover. So I applaud the goal — my goal is to have every American with a private health insurance plan that they can keep throughout their lives. And so, I still admire him for taking on the task, but I think it's important to recognize that that's not where we want our healthcare to go. States can compete with different plans, but we shouldn't have anything like what they did in Massachusetts at the federal level.

Romney has already started to walk back a little bit on healthcare.  Earlier this month in New Hampshire he said there were some problems with the Massachusetts healthcare bill, but he has been very careful to say it’s different than President Obama’s healthcare reform.