Report: Romney’s 2012 health plan could weaken his Massachusetts reforms

The healthcare plan that Mitt Romney would pursue as president could severely undermine the policies he implemented as Massachusetts governor, according to a report Friday in The Boston Globe.

Policy experts who worked on and still support Romney’s Massachusetts plan said it would be undermined by his proposal to significantly cut federal Medicaid spending.

During his presidential campaign, Romney has defended the Massachusetts law against attacks from conservatives who are uneasy with the fact that it served as the model for President Obama’s healthcare reform law. He says Obama was wrong to apply the same policies at the federal level and maintains that he did what was best for his state.

But the policies that worked for Massachusetts might not keep working under a President Romney, according to several liberal-leaning health policy experts. 

{mosads}John McDonough, an architect of both the Massachusetts and federal healthcare laws, told the Globe that Romney’s state-level reforms would have been “impossible” under the Medicaid system he’s now advocating.

Medicaid is now funded jointly by states and the federal government, and spending rises along with the number of people who need the program. Romney supports converting federal funding into a block grant for the states; block grants would cut federal spending and give the states more flexibility to cover fewer people or provide fewer benefits.

Medicaid covered or helped cover more than half of the people who gained coverage under Romney’s Massachusetts plan, the Globe reported.

Harvard University Professor David Cutler, who advised the Obama campaign on healthcare in 2008, has made a similar point in a recent post on the Journal of the American Medical Association website.

“Massachusetts will have no choice but to repeal the law” if Romney were to succeed in block-granting Medicaid and repealing the Affordable Care Act, Cutler wrote.