Romney’s religion is a dumb reason for deciding to vote against him, of course. But he is giving everyone better reasons.

Romney’s pretense that the successful Massachusetts health care reform law is not really the basis of the federal law (and similar to it) is starting to get really annoying — because he is lying outright about the federal law in order to appeal to the tea party and other far right extremists.

He reportedly came up with this, for example, “I do not want to live in a world where we have Obamacare telling us which insurance we have to have, which doctor we can have, which hospital we go to. I believe in a setting, as I described this morning, where people are able to choose their own doctor, choose their own insurance company. If they do not like their insurance company or their provider, they can get rid of them.”

He certainly knows that everything he suggested about the federal Affordable Care Act in that quotation is untrue. The federal law allows people to buy insurance from any company they choose and use the private doctors and hospitals they choose and just requires everyone to get themselves an insurance policy, same as the Massachusetts state law. He certainly has to know that.

In fact, both the federal and MA state law increase a person’s freedom to choose their insurance company and change companies when they want, because the new company cannot use a person’s health as a reason to avoid selling them a policy.

He has been misrepresenting, and I would say deliberately lying about, the federal law to get support from the far right who want to believe that kind of stuff — and it is harmful to the people of this country for him to be deliberately misleading people about the federal law, and thereby support efforts to defeat health care reform outside of Massachusetts.