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Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney says the tools students gain at the GSB can be used to handle the world’s most difficult problems, whether it’s in consulting, private equity, corporate America, the public sector, or even the U.S. Olympics, he said, referring to the fact that he salvaged the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City. “You do have the tools and you develop the skills to be able to take on assignments like that,” Romney, a former business consultant, told students during a presentation hosted by the student-led Graduate Business Council at Hyde Park Center October 11.
Those tools include the ability to disregard conventional wisdom, gather data, conduct rigorous analysis, and assemble an array of advisors, Romney said. “I bathe myself in the data. I graph it up, look at relationships and charts, try to get a sense of what is going on, and look for patterns that haven’t been visible before,” he said. “Finally, I assemble people to work with me who have different perspectives—the more off-the-wall, the better—people who can come up with entirely different perspectives that allow me to see the data and the analysis in a different light.”
Although these tools are rarely used in government, they can be very effective there, Romney said. He applied them to develop his state’s plan for requiring health insurance of all residents, Romney said. “We figured that people who didn’t have health insurance would largely be minority moms living in urban areas,” he said. “What we found were the majority of the uninsured were single males with high school diplomas and college degrees. Our perception was entirely wrong. It was an eminently insurable population.”
About half of the uninsured earned $50,000 or more a year and say health insurance to be too expensive, Romney said. Insurance companies said government regulations forced them to charge high premiums, he said. “We deregulated and our insurance companies have committed to providing policies at about half the premiums that existed before,” Romney said.
The “working poor” constituted the other half, whose Medicaid restrictions prevent them from earning more money, he said. “It’s a lousy insurance product,” Romney said. “Instead we decided to try to find a way to help the working poor buy their own health insurance on a sliding scale.” With careful analysis, economists determined Massachusetts could save $300,000 a year by helping the working poor buy their own policies instead of reimbursing hospitals for providing free care, he said.
Romney said he remains “overwhelmingly confident” in America’s strong will and ingenuity, but said the 21st century presents the country with the most challenging period in his lifetime. Wide-scale religious extremists seek the collapse of the U.S. government and military, Asia has emerged as a much tougher economic competitor than Europe, the federal government is spending too much money, and Americans are using far too much oil, he said.
Fifteen years ago, Asians and Americans earned about 4,700 PhDs a year, Romney said. Today, Asians earn 24,900 PhDs a year and Americans 4,400 a year, he said. “The world is watching. The capital markets are seeing where the brain power and the investment are occurring,” Romney said. “This is a very different competitor than we’ve faced before, economically. Unless we raise our capabilities dramatically, we’ll end up being the France or Great Britain of the 21st century, having started as an economic superpower and ending up as something less than that.”
—Phil Rockrohr