Word: romneys
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That was the bit of analysis that changed everything. Gruber ran the numbers at MIT: universal coverage would be expensive, but so would any half-measure. Romney could simply expand the existing system and, by doing so, cover about one-third more people. Or he could cover everyone by including an "individual mandate," a controversial measure requiring people to buy insurance and offering subsidies to those who couldn't afford it. The price tag would be about one-third higher. "I began by saying, Well, maybe we could help half the people that don't have insurance, maybe we could...
...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...
Someone else took notice as well. No one has fought longer and 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...
Their talks with Thompson went right down to the wire. The HHS Secretary signed the deal in a marathon negotiation with Romney and Kennedy that ended on Jan. 26, 2005, his last day on the job, while his going-away party was getting under way. The agreement stipulated that the commonwealth could keep the money but only if it passed a universal-coverage...
That outcome was far from certain. Romney and his PowerPoint traveled from one end of Massachusetts to the other. But as a Republican, Romney had very little leverage with the legislature, where the GOP's representation was so small it was less a minority than a cult. What's more, the senate and the house had very different ideas of what they wanted to do. As the two chambers squabbled, the Medicaid money was in danger of slipping away...