Massachusetts Citizens for Life said today it intends to place a referendum question on next year’s ballot that would repeal the health insurance mandate contained in the 2006 state health reform law.

At a press conference in front of the State House, Anne Fox, the pro-life group’s president, said her longer-range goal is to repeal the entire law, which served as a template for the national health care law. She said her organization seeks to protect life at all stages of development, and that the state’s health care law is so costly that it will soon require the rationing of resources.

“The way [the law]’s constituted, they’re going to have to deny care,” Fox predicted. “It could be care to the unborn, it could be care to a pregnant woman, it could be care to someone with disabilities – they’re going to be denying care. And that’s a pro-life concern.”

Brian Rosman, research director at Health Care for All, an advocacy group that supports the state law, said some of  Fox’s facts are wrong and suggested the real target of the Citizens for Life ballot effort is the national health care law.

“I think it has much more to do with national politics and President Obama’s re-election than health care in Massachusetts,” he said.

Fox said her group chose to focus its repeal effort on the individual health insurance mandate because it seemed a logical starting point and because it would “bring to the attention of the nation what’s going on in Massachusetts.

“Right now in Massachusetts we have the highest premiums in the country – four times the national average. We have the longest waits for doctors,” Fox said. She said that many of the 6 percent of people who were uninsured before the law was enacted were young people who needed only “catastrophic insurance,” which is less expensive than the minimum level of insurance required under the state’s mandate.

Fox also said 4 percent of the state’s population remained uninsured, a number disputed by state officials. The State Department of Health Care Finance and Policy put the number of uninsured at 6.4 percent in 2006 before health reform and 1.9 percent after, in 2010.

Rosman said Fox was also incorrect in claiming the health care law will lead to health care rationing. He said the law “has reduced rationing of care and dramatically expanded access to health services.” He noted that a Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation report found that the costs of the law were “modest and affordable.”

 “We’re not hearing stories of rationing,” Rosman said. “We’re hearing stories of people who are grateful that the health care law is helping them to get coverage.”

If the ballot question’s language is approved by Attorney General Martha Coakley, Fox said her group will need to gather more than 68,000 signatures this fall to send the question to the Legislature. If the Legislature does not enact the question into law, a second, smaller signature drive will be done to put the question on the 2012 ballot.