Romney spokeswoman uses Mass. health law to respond to Priorities USA ad

Andrea Saul, Mitt Romney's spokeswoman, cited the Massachusetts health care law today to come to the candidate's defense:

A Mitt Romney spokesperson offered an unusual counterattack Tuesday to an ad in which a laid-off steelworker blames the presumptive GOP nominee for his family losing health care: If that family had lived in Massachusetts, it would have been covered by the former governor’s universal health care law.

“To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Gov. Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care,” Andrea Saul, Romney’s campaign press secretary said during an appearance on Fox News. “There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President [Barack] Obama’s economy.”

The ad by Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting Obama, features Joe Soptic, a steelworker who was laid off from a plant owned by Romney-founded Bain Capital, discussing his wife’s cancer and eventual death. Soptic said his family lost health insurance after he was laid off.

Saul disputed the ad’s accuracy — Soptic’s wife didn’t die until several years after her husband was laid off, and had health insurance from a job of her own during some of that time — and called the ad “despicable.”

This answer is problematic for the candidate and will surely come up in Democrats' attacks on Romney, given that health care has always been a complicated issue for him. But it's also worth noting that the Romney campaign isn't the only one pushing back on the ad in question: it's received a lot of criticism for not portraying events accurately.