Word: plan
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...exactly jump at the prospect. It would cost billions of dollars; he was already facing a budget deficit and had promised not to raise taxes. Michael Dukakis had tried to tackle the same issue in 1988, and he provoked so much outrage from the Massachusetts business community that his plan was repealed before it ever went into effect. And then there was the cautionary tale of Hillary Clinton's disastrous experience with a national health-care-reform plan in 1994. "No, thanks," Romney recalls telling Stemberg. "It just can't be done." So that was that, Stemberg thought. "I just...
...presidential campaign. But these days Romney isn't trumpeting his health-care effort. In fact, when he does talk about the issue on the campaign trail, it is to call Hillary Clinton's proposal, which is strikingly similar to what he did in Massachusetts, a "European-style socialized-medicine plan." But if you ask him how he did it, as I did during an Iowa campaign swing, Romney becomes effusive. It may be that this tale from Massachusetts reveals what kind of President Romney could be. "He was incredibly impressive, with his intellect, his ability," says MIT economics professor Jonathan...
...November 2004, nearly two years after his meeting with Stemberg, Romney was finally ready to go public with the beginnings of a plan. As it evolved, it became a proposal to achieve an end that liberals had long dreamed of, but through conservative means: creating more competition in the private-insurance marketplace and insisting that Massachusetts citizens take personal responsibility for their own coverage. "From the minute you heard him articulate it, you knew this was a new concept in American health-care policy," says Robert Blendon, a Harvard University professor of health policy. "It was a very different...
...harder for universal health coverage than Senator Edward Kennedy; he introduced a national health-insurance bill back in 1970. But he and the Governor were not exactly allies. Romney had challenged Kennedy for his Senate seat in 1994 in a nasty race. Reading the first outlines of Romney's plan in the Boston Globe, Kennedy decided the Republican Governor was serious about the issue, and he told his staff to reach out to Romney's advisers. Before long, Romney was in Kennedy's office in Washington, taking his PowerPoint slides with him. "Had Senator Kennedy said, 'This is a lousy...
Kennedy was sold, and both men turned to the question of how to pay for the plan. Part of the money could be shifted from the existing $1.1 billion fund through which hospitals had been compensated for the care they were providing the uninsured. But to fund universal coverage, they desperately needed to persuade HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson to allow Massachusetts to keep the $385 million in Medicaid funds that Washington was threatening to take away. The money would also give them leverage back home with health-care providers and businesses, two powerful constituencies and potential opponents of reform...