Romney's Health Care Solution

First Governor Romney put up his education proposals in the Wall Street Journal. Now he has done the same for health care.

Actually he has written an article describing the universal health care program recently enacted in Massachusetts.

It all started when Romney talked to Tom Stemberg, founder of Staples, who told him to figure out how to do health insurance. When Mitt objected, Tom said: “You can find a way.”

So Mitt set to work, and found out why the uninsured were uninsured. First of all, he found that

Some 20% of the state's uninsured population qualified for Medicaid but had never signed up.

That was easy. He set up web pages so that people could sign up for Medicaid when they turned up at the ER.

Another 40% of the uninsured were earning enough to buy insurance but had chosen not to do so. Why? Because it is expensive, and because they know that if they become seriously ill, they will get free or subsidized treatment at the hospital. By law, emergency care cannot be withheld. Why pay for something you can get free?

So Mitt set out to change the law to allow high deductible insurance without all the mandatory benefits so insurers could lower their premiums.

Another group of uninsured citizens in Massachusetts consisted of working people who make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford health-care insurance.

For them Romney proposed a subsidy, to be paid out of the state’s $1 billion uninsured-care fund. But would $1 billion be enough?

Jonathan Gruber of MIT built an econometric model of the population, and with input from insurers, my in-house team crunched the numbers. Again, the result surprised us: We needed far less than the $1 billion for the subsidies.

Of course, no policy reform would be complete without valuable assistance from the conservative Heritage Foundation. The Heritage guys came up with “a 'connector,' allowing citizens to purchase health insurance with pretax dollars, even if their employer makes no contribution.”

Can Mitt Romney keep this up? First he puts out a six point program on education that we reviewed yesterday, then he explains his uninsured health care solution. What could be next? The White House?