Robert Moffit has been a veteran of Washington policymaking for more than 25 years, and is Director of The Heritage Foundation's Center for Health Policy Studies.
A former senior official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Personnel Management during the Reagan administration, Moffit specializes in Medicare reform, health insurance, and other health policy issues.
Moffit's team helped develop the Massachusetts' health insurance reform initiative in 2005. The Massachusetts plan created an innovative system that empowers employees in small businesses to choose the health plan through a statewide "health insurance exchange." This market-based approach would enable these Bay State citizens to own a private and fully portable health insurance plan and take it with them from job to job without a loss of generous federal tax breaks for employer-based coverage. Since Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney signed this plan into law, officials in almost two dozen states have asked Moffit and his colleagues to help them develop statewide market-based solutions for their health system problems.
Moffit's research also involves him in continuing debates over how to reform Medicare, how to ensure access to prescription drugs, and how to improve access to private health care coverage. Moffit continues to be an advocate of a consumer-driven approach: He recommends that the government adopt a new program for the baby boomers entering Medicare in 2011 similar to the consumer-driven Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP), which Moffit became familiar with while working at the federal Office of Personnel Management, the agency that runs the program. FEHBP allows members of Congress and federal workers to select coverage from a broad range of competing private health plans. Moffit has been an advocate of the free market principles of consumer choice and competition since the early 1990s, when he chastised Congress for keeping such a system of choice and competition " exclusively for itself and federal workers while considering ways to impose vastly inferior systems on almost all [other] Americans."
Moffit has been in the middle of national health care policy debates before. After joining Heritage in 1991, Moffit's first task was to frame Heritage's response to President Clinton's plan to nationalize the country's health care system. He started by isolating himself in a room with nothing but the 1,342-page proposal and a few yellow legal pads. After five days of reading and taking notes, Moffit had drafted Heritage's analysis of the Clinton mammoth plan. His efforts paid off in 1993: The Washington Post ran a feature story detailing Moffit's criticisms of the Clinton proposal, and newspapers around the country praised Heritage's proposal for a consumer-driven health care policy that would provide tax credits to help people buy their health insurance from whomever they choose.
Since then, Moffit has been a regular source for the media on health care issues. He has appeared on all major cable news channels and the broadcast networks. He has published in professional journals, such as Health Affairs and the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. His quotes and op-ed essays have appeared in all the major newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Washington Times.
But health care isn't Moffit's only concern. He's also credited with being the first major policy analyst to cite Great Britain's partially privatized social security system with hopes of improving on that model to build a similar system in the United States.
Then there's crime. Moffit, who comes from a family of Philadelphia police officers, co-wrote "Making America Safer," a how-to guide for local governments to better support their police departments with former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, now a Heritage's Ronald Reagan distinguished fellow and chairman of its Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. He also co-edited Heritage's "School Choice 2001: What's Happening in the States."
Moffit received his bachelor's degree in political science from LaSalle University in Philadelphia and his doctorate from the University of Arizona. During the Reagan Administration, he served as the Assistant Director of Congressional Relations in the Office of Personal Management and as the Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
March 8, 2008
