::::::::
One of the most substantive revelations of last
night's PBS documentary Frontline:
The Choice 2012 was how Mitt Romney constructed RomneyCare with the
help of MIT health policy expert Jonathan Gruber. Gruber, on camera,
recalled how Romney dealt with the policy ramifications of the individual
mandate as "an engineering problem." Gruber was an architect of the
individual mandate, but in so doing he was merely extrapolating from the
groundwork laid by the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1990s. He
offered the logic model now so familiar to haters and supporters of the
Affordable Care Act: that the extra costs of universal insurance coverage
within Massachusetts would be offset by compelling each qualified citizen to
carry health insurance.
According to Gruber, Romney accepted, no, embraced , the logic of the model and advanced it more aggressively
than any other initiative during his term in office. He embraced the
position against the advice of his own political advisors. He visited the
leader of the Democratically controlled state Senate at home on a Sunday,
unannounced, to solicit his support for the bill. He engineered a
rapprochement with his old nemesis Ted Kennedy to pass the bill. "
[Read the entire article at Open Salon:
http://open.salon.com/blog/steve_klingaman]
