Lexington resident Dr. Jonathan Gruber’s new book traverses some of the roughest political waters of our time — health care. Styled like a comic book, “Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How It Works” distills the complex and controversial topic into humorous and understandable terms.
Gruber, a professor of economics at MIT, was a key architect of health care reform in Massachusetts, serving as an inaugural member of the Health Connector Board in 2006. That year, he was named the 19th most powerful person in health care in the United States by Modern Healthcare Magazine. In 2008, he worked as a consultant to the Clinton, Edwards and Obama presidential campaigns and was called “possibly the [Democratic] party’s most influential health care expert” by the Washington Post.
Gruber, who also serves as director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, will discuss his book at Cary Library on Wednesday, Feb. 15. In advance of his talk, Gruber spoke with the Lexington Minuteman about the current state of health care, “Obamacare,” and how Massachusetts led the way for future reforms.
What are the main problems with health care today? What do people need to know?
Rising costs and people who don’t have access to true health insurance. Unless you have health insurance from your employer or the government, health insurance markets have failed in the U.S. That’s the prime reason for why we have 50 million uninsured Americans. The first part of this is really motivating people to understand why we need health care because I think people are skeptical.
[My book explains] how we really address these problems and specifically what we’ve done in Massachusetts — how Massachusetts really solved the first of these problems. We solved the coverage problem, but not the cost problem, and that was really all Mitt Romney’s doing. I mean, he’s sort of the hero of the story. Romney came up with this approach by fixing the broken health insurance market.
Does your book make ‘heroes’ out of many political characters?
Basically, it’s a comic book. I’m the narrator but there are cartoon representations of Mitt Romney or Obama or the ‘Bad Insurance Representative’ or the ‘Guy About To Have a Heart Attack.’
Can you break it down and describe a potential solution to these problems?
I like to think of it as a three-legged stool. The first leg is: We’re going to tell insurers you can no longer discriminate against the sick … You can’t deny sick people coverage. That’s what people like about this law, but if you just try to tell that to insurers … [their response is] to charge everyone as if they’re sick. An insurer is going to charge very high prices. Yes, that’s true, the sick and healthy can get insurance, but it’s very high.
Comments are closed.