The Boston Globe the have an interesting piece about how Massachusetts’ health care reform law came into being and the role Mitt Romney played in assure it’s passage. It is well worth a read. The article shows what a prominent role Romney played personally in making sure a individual mandate was part of the final legislation and why it would be impossible for him now to fully renounce the one in the Massachusetts’ law he signed. From the Boston Globe:

Romney’s grasp of the subject was “unbelievably impressive,’’ he said, and the governor warmed to the game-changing potential of the individual mandate. Romney’s political advisers, however, “were not that keen on it,’’ [Jonathan] Gruber said.

To them, the political hazards spoke louder than the policy-making opportunity.

The key players in the Massachusetts debate know what a critical champion Romney was of the individual mandate; so a total flip flop on the issue would be too deeply cynical as to be politically unfeasible

The article again made it clear how many of the most important components of the Massachusetts law, which also eventually made it into the Affordable Care Act, were only a few years ago seen as deep conservative policies advanced by right wing think tanks.

The Illinois’s health care reform implementation panel has released its initial recommendations. They concluded that the private insurer exchanges created by the new health care law are likely to be a relatively bad deal for low-income residents, and that the state would be able to provide them better and cheaper coverage through a new public [...]

The subsidized private health insurance exchanges created by the new health care law are going to do a very poor job of providing affordable health care to the low income Americans they are meant to serve, according to a new draft report to the Connecticut General Assembly from the Sustinet Health Partnership Board of Directors. [...]

Ezra Klein has a new, strange, and incorrect defense of the individual mandate in the Senate bill: I think some on the left would say that they just want to remove the individual mandate. But if they do that, then the healthy will leave the plan, and the average premiums will be the average premiums [...]

This newest “alternative” to the public option, which is nothing like a public option, sounds (from what information is available) to be pretty much useless. All indications are that it is nothing more than just another exchange run by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The idea of creating exchanges to give individuals and small [...]

The Senate bill would give more small businesses access to the new exchanges quicker than the House bill. In the Senate bill, any business with 100 or fewer employees could use the new exchange. Starting in year four (2017), individual states could choose to allow larger businesses to also use the exchange. Conversely, the House [...]

JOHANNS: If a woman wants her health insurance plan to provide elective abortion services, she does have the choice to purchase a health insurance plan that provides that on the exchange — she just has to pay for it with her own money. Am I correct in that interpretation, or have I misunderstood?

HATCH: That’s correct.

A lot has been made of the fact that the new health insurance exchange would only be open to a small subsection of the population which is uninsured or works for a small business. The new public option will only be available to people on the new exchange. As a result, most people would be [...]

Ezra Klein really thinks health care exchanges will work at driving down cost despite there being little to no evidence to back up his theory. In fact, today, he just admitted that there is strong evidence to the contrary: For people, like, well, me, who think that the health insurance exchanges have a real shot [...]

As I get more information about Cantwell’s “basic health plan” amendment the more I like it. (The modified amendment is available here.) I really wish Cantwell would stop calling it a public option. It is not a public option. I think it is an idea which should be debated on its own merits and not [...]