Perhaps President Obama’s greatest legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, was made possible by an unlikely person: Gov. Mitt Romney.
“The Affordable Care Act is a Massachusetts bill with three more zeros,” MIT professor John Gruber, one of the architects of the Massachusetts bill quipped on The Ed Show Wednesday. “It really is a similar approach.”
Gruber and his Harvard colleague John McDonough, who was also instrumental in the writing the Massachusetts bill, were often consulted in the crafting of Obamacare, Gruber said, and the plans have a lot in common.
“John and I were constantly shuttling back and forth being asked ‘how did you do it in Massachusetts?’”
But it was Romneycare's overwhelming success in Massachusetts that really helped to pave the way for the ACA.
“The success we had in Massachusets was instrumental in making politicans feel more comfortable in what they were about to do [with ACA]," Gruber said. "Romneycare had two goals: They wanted to cover the uninsured, we’ve covered nearly all our uninsured, and they wanted to fix the broken non-group market. Premiums in our non-group market have fallen by more than 50 percent.”
Of course, you wouldn't know it from Romney's rhetoric on the issue. He says he wants to repeal Obamacare, while rarely talking about his own law.