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Mitt Romney talks with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.

Mitt Romney talks with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.

It's not so much what Mitt Romney said about whether the government should guarantee people health care in his interview on CBS's 60 Minutes Sunday that has health care policy types buzzing. It's how that compares to what he has said before.

To back up a bit, Scott Pelley asked the former Massachusetts governor if he thinks "the government has a responsibility to provide health care to the 50 million Americans who don't have it today?"

Romney responded:

"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance ... if someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care."

That was basically Romney's way of saying that people who don't have insurance can always go to the hospital emergency room.

Yet in 2010, in an appearance on MSNBC, Romney said almost exactly the opposite: "It doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility," he said at the time.

That's because back then, Romney was defending the Massachusetts law he signed as governor. It's the one that requires most people to either have health insurance or pay a fine just like the federal law he now vows to repeal.

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Romney's Medicaid Remarks On '60 Minutes' Raise Eyebrows