Gingrich Gave RomneyCare the Thumbs Up in 2006

It's another "whoops" for Newt Gingrich: CNN yesterday broke the news that the candidate's story about how his first divorce went down wasn't exactly true. The Wall Street Journal today reveals the results of its own digging. It seems that while Gingrich has publicly panned Mitt Romney's Massachusetts healthcare law (calling it "one more big-government, bureaucratic, high-cost system"), he actually gave it the thumbs up when it passed by way of an April 2006 newsletter published by his former consulting company, the Center for Health Transformation.

"The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system," reads the unsigned essay in the "Newt Notes" newsletter, which the Journal was able to track down online though it is no longer live on the center's website. A follow-up essay published four months later called it "the most interesting effort to solve the uninsured problem in America today." A rep said the essays weren't actually penned by Gingrich, were not meant to be an endorsement of RomneyCare, and actually questioned whether it would actually work. "Being critical ... isn't endorsing it," noted the rep. Click to read more passages from the newsletter. (More Newt Gingrich stories.)