Mitt Romney and Rick Perry said at Wednesday night’s POLITICO/NBC News debate that they’d issue executive orders to obliterate the ACA on “day one” of their presidencies.

Romney said he’d direct HHS to “put out an executive order granting a waiver from Obamacare to all 50 states.” Perry said he’d issue an executive order under which “Obamacare will be wiped out as much as it can be.”

But Bachmann explained — correctly — that a president can’t just waive away the ACA.

“With all due respect to the governors, issuing an executive order will not overturn this massive law,” Bachmann said. It has to be repealed, she said, and “the repeal bill will just not come to our desk.”

The waivers authorized in the health law allow escape from only certain, narrow provisions of the law; they don’t give the president authority to cancel the individual mandate or other major provisions of the legislation.

The law authorizes the HHS secretary to issue waivers to companies or insurers freeing them from rules requiring minimum standards of health coverage. Other waivers, which the administration calls “adjustments,” allow states to ask the administration to loosen requirements that insurance companies spend a certain percentage of premiums on medical care.

A third waiver will be available in 2017 that will allow states to implement their own health reforms, but only if they achieve the same basic goals as the original law — like covering as many people and making the insurance as generous and affordable as it would be under the law.

Perry seemed to acknowledge the limits of what a president could do via executive order, saying his order would wipe out the ACA “as much as it can be.”

Bachmann pledged to help elect 13 Republicans to the Senate to pass a repeal bill.

“This will take a very strong, bold leader in the presidency who will lead that effort,” she said.

Many Republicans have said they would support granting the states Medicaid waivers, which would give governors wide discretion over how to operate their Medicaid programs. While the waivers could relieve the states of some of the health law’s Medicaid requirements — namely the law’s expansion to cover up to 133 percent of the Federal Poverty Level — they wouldn’t cover the entire law.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 6:48 a.m. on September 8, 2011.