Mitt Romney's Problem-Solving Machine

Mitt Romney’s Problem-Solving Machine. On the groundwork for Romneycare: “When Romney was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002, one of the members of his transition team was Tom Stemberg, the founder of Staples. The two men were talking one day, and Romney asked Stemberg if he had any ideas for how he ought to govern. Stemberg, thinking off the top of his head, had two ideas. ‘One was to blow up Logan airport and start over.’ That didn’t make it far. The other one did: Stemberg served then (as now) on the president’s council of Massachusetts General Hospital, and he remembered a conversation he’d had with a doctor named Peter Slavin, who has been the chief executive of that hospital system for most of the last decade. ‘[Slavin] mentioned this huge problem,’ Stemberg told me, ‘which is all these uninsured people clog the ER.'” By now, you know the rest. [NY Magazine]