Word: romneys
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Three and a half years later, Romney signed a law that made Massachusetts the first state in the nation to guarantee health coverage for all. It was the kind of accomplishment on which a Governor might want to build a 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...
Comparatively speaking, the health-care situation in Massachusetts wasn't all that dire when Romney took office: the state's percentage of uninsured among its nonelderly (13.2%) was smaller than the national average (17.8%), and it had a better safety net, thanks to a $1.1 billion fund the commonwealth had established to reimburse hospitals and health centers that provided medically necessary care to people who couldn't pay for it. But with a third of the state budget going toward health care, the sheer inefficiency of treating the sore throats of the uninsured in emergency rooms didn...
That whiff of a challenge was reinforced by the stories Romney heard as he traveled the state. After talking to a jeweler in North Andover, a man about his age, Romney remembers thinking, "Gosh, he's 55. He could have a heart attack. He could get cancer. He's got his own business, but he doesn't have health insurance? How can this...
...Romney started asking for ideas from his aides, many of whom--especially his political advisers--thought he should just drop it. "It was pooh-poohed by everybody," he says. "I am obstinate. I kept on drawing these squares: Well, if you have this number of people, you take that money, you move it there, couldn't that work? Let's do the math." State HHS secretary Ron Preston kept coming back to the one alternative Romney said he wouldn't accept: Dukakis' approach of requiring employers to either cover their workers or pay a hefty fee. "We didn't make...
When they considered the situation as if it were a business-school case study, some simple steps became clear, like getting the word out to the 106,000 Massachusetts citizens who were eligible for Medicaid but didn't seem to know it. Yet they also found something surprising when Romney began looking at who, precisely, the uninsured were in Massachusetts. Everyone expected the typical profile to be that of a single mother just scraping by or maybe someone with chronic illness--not exactly ideal customers for insurers. Instead, nearly the opposite was true. "It turned out they were largely single...