"As of April 12, 2006, Jonathan Gruber became the most influential economist in Massachusetts government. That was the day Gov. Mitt Romney signed a sweeping health care reform law that had Gruber’s distinct fingerprints on it. Of course, at the Faneuil Hall bill-signing ceremony the cameras focused on Romney and key legislative leaders-and on U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who flew in for the event. But it was Gruber, 41, a professor of economics at MIT, who had pushed from the beginning for a new state requirement that all residents of the Commonwealth carry health insurance.
In addition to this first-in-the-nation individual mandate, the law created a new state authority to oversee the re-making of the health care market, and Gruber was named one of 10 board members of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority. So this MIT professor’s work in health care economics has already directly affected many thousands of lives in Massachusetts.
In the year since the enactment of the law, well more than 100,000 state residents have been newly covered by health insurance, either by expanded Medicaid or through the new Commonwealth Care plan, which offers subsidized insurance for those who make up to three times the federal poverty line level (up to about $60,000 for a family of four). By this July, all residents are legally required to carry health insurance, though Gruber says it won’t be worth looking at numbers until mid 2008 to see how close to universal coverage we are, since full compliance won’t happen without a good deal more publicity. Meanwhile, Gruber has been called in to advise other states—including California and Minnesota-to help them devise plans to expand health insurance coverage.
Gruber’s role in Massachusetts health care reform began without fanfare. After working in Washington in 1997 and 1998 as an economic policy advisor for the U.S. Treasury Department, Gruber returned to MIT, where he has been a professor since 1992, and developed a health care “micro-simulation model.” The idea was to build a computer program that would predict the results of various health care changes......." Tough medicine