In defending his health care plan, former Massachusetts governor turned presidential candidate Mitt Romney never fails to call it a “free market” plan or to denounce “HillaryCare,” the presumed alternative. In the most recent Iowa debate, he proclaimed: “This is a country that can get all of our people insured with not a government takeover, without HillaryCare, without socialized medicine…. We [in Massachusetts] didn’t expand government programs.”

In reality, as my collegue Michael Cannon has pointed out, RomneyCare is virtually indistinguishable from HillaryCare. But don’t take our word for it.

Joe Conason of the New York Observer is the latest liberal advocate of national health care to note the similarities. As Conason says, “Actually, his fabulous Bay State plan is based entirely on governmental action, from mandating insurance coverage and minimum coverage requirements to subsidizing insurance and imposing fines on those who fail to comply.”

Romney has been trying to position himself as the “conservative” alternative to Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. But being a conservative Republican should be about more than abortion policy and the War on Terror. At the very least, supporting a government take over of one-seventh of the U.S. economy should disqualify one from being anything but the biggest of big-government conservatives.