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Longtime leading lobbyist opposing universal health care Michael Bromberg passed away recently at the age of 78.
Couple of excerpts from the Washington Post obit linked below:
When President Carter proposed aggressive cost-containment measures in 1977 to limit soaring health-care costs, Mr. Bromberg helped organize a voluntary, industry-wide effort to lower prices, deterring the federal government from further regulation.
A decade later, amid continued calls for health-care reform, Mr. Bromberg spearheaded the founding of the Healthcare Leadership Council, a consortium of top health-care executives who worked to oppose a single-payer system of health insurance, in which the government — rather than private insurers — pays all health-care costs. For any reforms that did pass, the consortium pushed to minimize government regulation.
Following the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton, who had called for comprehensive health insurance on the campaign trail, large-scale health-care reform seemed inevitable.
A task force led by first lady Hillary Clinton and Clinton aide Ira Magaziner, a former business consultant, drafted a 1,342-page plan that proposed to make health insurance mandatory — a core element that some health-care lobbyists, chief among them Mr. Bromberg, found unacceptable.
In their first meeting, Mr. Bromberg later said, he pushed for Clinton to compromise on the bill by dropping the universal-coverage mandate and a provision that would have put a cap on the cost of health care, among other items. The hypothetical compromise bill, he said, would have still allowed individuals to take their insurance plan with them from job to job, included vouchers to ensure coverage for children and pregnant women, and insured coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions.
Mr. Bromberg’s later attempts to forge a compromise were unsuccessful, and he became a chief opponent of the bill, meeting with newspaper editorial boards and successfully lobbying members of Congress behind the scenes.
After the bill was defeated, in 1994, Mr. Bromberg expressed disappointment that a compromise to expand health-care coverage was not reached. The Clintons, he told the PBS program “Frontline,” had failed to seize a historic opportunity.
“You can’t walk in here with a plan, this gigantic, and just hand it to the Congress, and expect them to pass it. It’s just not going to happen,” he said. “But, they could’ve had half of it.”
Last quote there seems a bit ironic now. But kinda makes you wonder what the health insurance environment would look like today had there been a compromise back then.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health_care/michael-bromberg-leading-health-insurance-lobbyist-dies-at-78/2016/08/16/64f80bb6-62f0-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html
Couple of excerpts from the Washington Post obit linked below:
When President Carter proposed aggressive cost-containment measures in 1977 to limit soaring health-care costs, Mr. Bromberg helped organize a voluntary, industry-wide effort to lower prices, deterring the federal government from further regulation.
A decade later, amid continued calls for health-care reform, Mr. Bromberg spearheaded the founding of the Healthcare Leadership Council, a consortium of top health-care executives who worked to oppose a single-payer system of health insurance, in which the government — rather than private insurers — pays all health-care costs. For any reforms that did pass, the consortium pushed to minimize government regulation.
Following the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton, who had called for comprehensive health insurance on the campaign trail, large-scale health-care reform seemed inevitable.
A task force led by first lady Hillary Clinton and Clinton aide Ira Magaziner, a former business consultant, drafted a 1,342-page plan that proposed to make health insurance mandatory — a core element that some health-care lobbyists, chief among them Mr. Bromberg, found unacceptable.
In their first meeting, Mr. Bromberg later said, he pushed for Clinton to compromise on the bill by dropping the universal-coverage mandate and a provision that would have put a cap on the cost of health care, among other items. The hypothetical compromise bill, he said, would have still allowed individuals to take their insurance plan with them from job to job, included vouchers to ensure coverage for children and pregnant women, and insured coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions.
Mr. Bromberg’s later attempts to forge a compromise were unsuccessful, and he became a chief opponent of the bill, meeting with newspaper editorial boards and successfully lobbying members of Congress behind the scenes.
After the bill was defeated, in 1994, Mr. Bromberg expressed disappointment that a compromise to expand health-care coverage was not reached. The Clintons, he told the PBS program “Frontline,” had failed to seize a historic opportunity.
“You can’t walk in here with a plan, this gigantic, and just hand it to the Congress, and expect them to pass it. It’s just not going to happen,” he said. “But, they could’ve had half of it.”
Last quote there seems a bit ironic now. But kinda makes you wonder what the health insurance environment would look like today had there been a compromise back then.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health_care/michael-bromberg-leading-health-insurance-lobbyist-dies-at-78/2016/08/16/64f80bb6-62f0-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html
