The 20th anniversary of a landmark health care reform brought five Massachusetts governors to Faneuil Hall Monday, along with some playful banter over which of them should have lent the law their name.
On April 12, 2006, then Gov. Mitt Romney signed a first-in-the-nation law requiring all Massachusetts residents to buy health insurance. The law, dubbed Romneycare, extended health coverage to hundreds of thousands of people and became the framework for the federal Affordable Care Act.
Romney’s successor on Beacon Hill, former Gov. Deval Patrick, recalled the weedy work that followed. Romney signed the law in his final year in office, so much of the implementation — like defining what “affordable” insurance looked like in practice — fell to the Patrick administration. Patrick said the team that carried out the work “understood that health care was not an issue of abstract economics or regulation, but one of human dignity.”
“I used to joke, Gov. Romney, that we’d done so much to make Romneycare a reality, we really should call it Patrickcare,” Patrick said on Monday, as Romney flashed a thumbs-up from down the stage.
Gov. Maura Healey and former Govs. Bill Weld and Mike Dukakis joined Romney and Patrick onstage for the commemoration, before a hall packed with lawmakers, bureaucrats, health care leaders and other officials from past and present.
Romney, a Republican, served as Massachusetts governor from 2003 to 2007 and as U.S. senator from Utah from 2019 to 2025. In between, he ran twice for president, winning his party’s nomination to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012. During that campaign, Romney walked something of a tightrope on health policy, both opposing Obamacare and standing by the Massachusetts law despite jabs from his primary opponents.
Back in Boston Monday, Romney praised the process that led to the 2006 law.
“Now, having spent six years in Washington, I have greater appreciation for what we did here in Massachusetts,” Romney said.
He described a group of politicians who “came to the job to get things done, not just to see what we could do to get ourselves re-elected.” Political rivals, Romney said, “respected each other, buried political weapons, and worked together to find solutions.”
Later, Romney told reporters that he wished Washington “worked more like Massachusetts did back in the days” when he collaborated on health care with a pair of Democratic legislative leaders, then-Senate President Robert Travaglini and then-House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi.
“We need more of that kind of attitude in Washington,” he said.
Travaglini said the trio talked daily and met weekly. He also recalled one weekend when Romney visited him and DiMasi each at home to move negotiations onward.
“We were capable of putting aside egos, personalities, party affiliations for the good of the people that we represented,” Travaglini said.
Along with the bipartisan back-patting, speakers did acknowledge that health care costs and access still pose challenges for many in Massachusetts.
“I hope that today’s celebrations can inspire a renewed commitment and all the stakeholders here today to come together and tackle the fundamental questions in health care about what we pay, how we pay it, and who gets left behind when it doesn’t go right,” said Ron Mariano, the current speaker of the Massachusetts House.
