It is a story that Mitt Romney has told again and again about his friend and Staples founder Tom Stemberg.  Shortly after Romney was elected governor in 2002, he put Stemberg on his transition team and asked him what he would do if he were in his shoes.  “If you really want to do a service to the people of Massachusetts,” Stemberg told Romney, “you should find a way of getting health care coverage to them.”  It was a seed firmly planted in Romney’s mind, one that would grow into the nation’s first universal health care law, later the template for Obamacare. Not only are more people in Massachusetts living longer today, but across the country more than 16 million formerly uninsured have coverage.  Stemberg, who died Friday at 66 after a battle with cancer, is mostly remembered as the office supply king. But in my mind, his enduring legacy will be in health care.  Stemberg was credited with revolutionizing retailing, creating a chain with $22.5 billion in annual revenue and more than 2,000 stores.  Not many knew this about Stemberg, but he was a policy wonk. A fiscal conservative with liberal views on social issues, one of his great passions was figuring better ways to deliver health care. He was a founding board member of Tufts Health Plan in 1979.  Davey Scoon, who went to Harvard Business School with Stemberg and worked with him in the supermarket business, recalled his colleague as vigilant about finding better, cheaper ways to package food. He imagines Stemberg was just as dedicated to controlling medical costs.  “Everything about Tom is about innovation,” said Scoon, who took Stemberg’s seat on the Tufts board and spent three decades there before stepping down last year. “Could you do things better and less expensively? That is the way he viewed things. That was the nature of the man.”  So it was that Stemberg made an impassioned plea to Romney to fix the health care system. Stemberg’s pitch: The uninsured were using emergency rooms instead of going to the doctor’s office, which was driving up costs for everyone. If more people had insurance, costs would go down.  Romney and Stemberg went way back. Romney’s Bain Capital was an early investor in Staples, which Stemberg launched in 1986 with a store in Brighton. The two became close friends. As one Stemberg buddy put it, Romney made Stemberg rich, and Stemberg made Romney rich.  Even so, Romney would later recount that he thought Stemberg’s idea of universal coverage was “impossible.”  To which Stemberg replied: “You can find a way.”  When Romney took office, he found health care costs wreaking havoc on the state budget. The so-called free care pool to pay for the uninsured was more than $1 billion annually — and growing. Meanwhile, the federal government was threatening to cut Medicaid funds for the working poor, a move that would create a $385 million budget hole.  Suddenly, Stemberg’s idea made a whole lot of sense. Perhaps extending coverage to the uninsured, as Stemberg suggested, could save money.  Romney’s administration began laying the groundwork in 2003 and 2004. Soon after, he filed legislation that included novel concepts such as requiring residents to obtain insurance; taking free-care pool funds and Medicaid money to create a subsidized insurance program for the working poor; and setting up an exchange for small businesses and individuals to buy insurance.  Romney’s idea for universal coverage gained traction because other players were ready to make it happen. A coalition of community and business leaders formed, including Andrew Dreyfus, then-head of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, John McDonough, then-chief of the advocacy group Health Care for All, and Jack Connors, then-chairman of Partners HealthCare, as well as the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization.  It would take two years of political capital and wrangling, not to mention buy-in from the Democrats who ran Beacon Hill, House Speaker Sal DiMasi and Senate President Bob Travaglini. In the spring of 2006, Romney signed the historic bill into law, with Senator Ted Kennedy, a champion of universal health care, looking on.  In an interview with the Globe after Stemberg’s passing, Romney once again gave credit to his friend.  “Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney said. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare. So without Tom, a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance.”
Best known as the founder of Staples, Tom Stemberg’s greatest legacy may be his role in bringing universal health care to Massachusetts.