Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles Baker said Sunday he was not worried that questions raised by his opponents about his professional roles in connection with the Big Dig and rising health care costs will drag down his campaign.
Gov. Deval Patrick and Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray in recent weeks have taken Baker to task, contrasting his salary north of $1 million as head of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care with years of soaring health care cost increases and questioning his role, as state budget chief in the 1990s, in formulating the financing strategy behind the Big Dig.
Asked if he were worried that the Big Dig and health cost jabs would inflict long-term damage, Baker said “no.”
“What people really care about right now is jobs, spending and taxes,” Baker told the News Service Sunday at a Republican St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in Scituate. “Democrats, Republicans and independents, it doesn’t matter. What they want to talk about and what they want somebody to do something about is spending, taxes and jobs. That’s what they’re worried about.”
The Patrick administration over the past two months has placed an emphasis on health care cost control, with the governor instituting rate regulations, pushing other controversial initiatives to cap cost escalation, and pledging to make changes to help small businesses afford insurance. Administration officials this week plan three intensive hearings on health care cost control at UMass-Boston.
Baker, who stepped down from Harvard Pilgrim to run for governor, said he had been pushing cost control ideas since 2004. His campaign highlighted Baker’s calls for full disclosure, for comparison purposes, of health care prices and referenced a recent report by Attorney General Martha Coakley identifying “wide disparities in payment levels are not explained by differences in quality or complexity of the health care services provided. It also cited a Patrick administration report citing provider prices as “the single most important factor” behind rising costs.
“I think it’s terrific that all of a sudden they’ve discovered health care,” Baker said. “I hope they’re serious about it. It’s a huge issue and I’ve never said it wasn’t. I’ve been talking about a variety of reforms literally since 2004. So I’m glad to have it on the table as an issue but I think they’re very late to the game and it looks blatantly political.”
After Murray called into question Baker’s former salary at Harvard Pilgrim, noting he had made $1.7 million in 2008 and $1.3 million for seven months of work at the health insurance company last year, Patrick last week told reporters Baker has "been in the middle" of system-wide double-digit annual increases and participated in efforts to delay cost-curbing efforts.
After testimony to a legislative panel in which he urged prompt action on a bill that would impose on care providers the same "soft cap" he has applied to insurers through regulation, Patrick said he wanted Baker to testify before the Legislature about trends in the industry and said he was frustrated that industry players have repeatedly talked about “why it is they can't help but charge double-digit increases every year to small businesses and families. And those small businesses and families don't have a voice at that table. They have my voice at that table."
Sen. Michael Knapik (R-Westfield), noting the administration’s efforts to regulate “egregious” rate increases, said Monday that Patrick had steered clear of efforts to substantially reduce business costs, including tort reform and medical malpractice reforms Knapik claimed would address the shortage of primary care doctors and neurosurgeons.
“That’s the piece that we have not seen come forward from the Corner Office,” Knapik said.
Knapik said he could see why Patrick would target Baker over health costs.
“It’s a great campaign issue,” he said. “I hope the public doesn’t fall for it.” He added, “We’ve spent a lot of time around the margins of trying to control and retain costs.”
In a Group Insurance Commission newsletter last summer, Baker praised “minor progress” at the state level posting information about inpatient and outpatient services as well as planned government hearings on health cost drivers.
“We still have a long way to go before the price and quality of health care services is as known and as understood as the price and quality of other goods and services. And I’m not expecting every individual to shop hard for an appendectomy either,” Baker wrote. “I’m more interested in having the health care industry, the media, the public policy making community, and the public in general engaged in an ongoing, informed discussion about why health care costs are high and what we can do about them. And I’d like to see those who perform well get some public recognition for their work. Under the current system, no one knows – and as a result, no one cares.”
While Baker was quick to defend his work on promoting transparency as a mode of controlling price increases, he chose Sunday not to counter criticism that he bears responsibility for the price escalation at the Big Dig. Baker became state administration and finance secretary in the fall of 1994, and served in that position until September of 1998, a core period for massive the highway project’s construction and financing plans.
Murray has described Baker as “the architect of the Big Dig financing scheme that has bankrupted the state's transportation system, it's led to the deplorable condition of road, rail and bridges.”
In a New Bedford Standard Times article last month, Baker said of the project’s rising costs, according to the newspaper, "I don't think it had anything to do with me. I mean the Turnpike Authority was running it at that point in time," he said.
During an early February interview on Fox 25, Baker called Patrick’s former transportation secretary James Aloisi the “big architect of the Big Dig.” Baker said of Aloisi, “He was really the star of the show,” contrasting Aloisi’s long involvement on the project with his four years as state budget chief.
Baker said the project weighed in at $3 billion when first proposed, $9 billion when Gov. William Weld took office in 1990 and said its price held at $11 billion during his four-year run as state budget chief, before rising to $15 billion.
“I’ll be the first to admit that the Big Dig is a fiasco from a financial point of view,” Baker said during the Fox 25 interview. He said the project’s lesson was not to commit to big projects where the costs and financing sources are not clear, asserting that Patrick and Murray are pursuing “mini-Big Dig projects” that fit that description.
