Toast.
(Jennifer Rubin) — It is “sad,” says MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, that presidential candidate Mitt Romney is running away from his Massachusetts health care plan, a plan that Gruber says “gave birth to one of the greatest pieces of social legislation in our history,” namely President Obama’s 2010 health-care reform legislation. Aside from Romney, Gruber is the man most responsible for the Massachusetts plan. And given how important the debate is over the ‘Cares — RomneyCare and ObamaCare, as they’re often dubbed — I decided to go to the man who perhaps knows more than anyone about the development of both.
In a candid phone interview, Gruber explained how RomneyCare came about, where he thinks the critics have it wrong and whether potential “defenses” against his own plan by the Republican 2012 frontrunner hold up to scrutiny.
Gruber says that by the time he met Obama in 2006, the Massachusetts plan had already passed. He recalls that coming out of the Clinton years, “when the government had money to spend,” states could apply for grants from the Health and Human Services Department to study how the states could expand health care coverage. He was contacted by the Massachusetts department, which had received such a grant, and worked on different “models” for health care reform. When Romney later entered office and wanted to work on health care reform, the same department called Gruber in, because, of course, he had done much of the work already.
Gruber tells me, “What I can tell you is that there was an active debate on the individual mandate.” He explains, “On one hand, Romney felt people were free-riding” on the health care system — that is, remaining uninsured but burdening the government health care system when they became sick or injured. On the other hand, Gruber says, was the “freedom” argument about the mandate. He says, “What I’d like to think carried the day was that I pointed out that without the mandate you would spend the same money and cover fewer people.”
Gruber says in the one face-to-face meeting he had with Romney, it was clear Romney had made the “final call.” Gruber tells me: “He was the champion of the plan. He really was the consummate management consultant.” And, Gruber says, the plan that passed and is now operating is not fundamentally different from the individual mandate plan that Romney “championed.” Gruber says, “The framework is basically the same.” Moreover, Romney understood that the bill would be a framework, with the details to be filled in later (e.g., the definition of “affordable” health care). “He said so at the signing ceremony,” Gruber recollects. So the notion that the plan was hijacked by the Democratic-controlled legislature is simply not so, he asserts.
HT: Brian