Bluto does good
Last week, with healthcare reform collapsing, Jack Connors called House Speaker Sal DiMasi. Connors had spent more than a year working the issue -- in particular getting more money for his beloved hospitals -- and he wasn't happy where this was going. Connors, long a power broker, is at base a salesman. Jackism: ''The word 'no' is the start of the selling process."
So the next morning, on Tuesday, Connors was in the speaker's office -- and he brought a prop. Connors slipped a disc into DiMasi's DVD player. It was the classic ''Animal House," and Bluto -- a.k.a. John Belushi -- was exhorting the misfits of Delta House to not give in to Dean Wormer and the overwhelming odds.
''What, over? You say over? Nothing is over till we decide it is over!"
When the clip was done, Connors turned to DiMasi: ''Nothing is over till I say it is over."
Connors was selling -- being Jack, doing what he does best. And he was on a mission. The roadblock to getting a bill done was DiMasi's insistence on business contributing real money to a solution. DiMasi had favored a payroll tax on companies that don't offer insurance. His number came to $600 an employee, maybe more. The business community had reluctantly moved from zero to $62 an employee, what companies that offer insurance pay into the state's pool for the uninsured.
Connors had his own number: $300. Would DiMasi accept $300? The answer was yes.
The next day Connors convened a meeting in his office in the John Hancock Tower, where top executives from Partners HealthCare, where Connors is chairman, Blue Cross and Blue Shield and business groups agreed, more or less, on the $300. The next day a smaller group, including Connors, Blue Cross's Peter Meade and Michael Widmer of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation met with Senate President Robert Travaglini, who liked what he heard. The following morning DiMasi and Travaglini met with Connors and others and the deal was struck -- five days after Connors' first call to DiMasi.
Connors calls it a team effort. ''My sole mission was to restart the negotiations," he says.
The healthcare debate has focused on extending coverage to the uninsured -- a good thing. But the muscle to get it done came from the state's powerful hospital industry -- read: Partners HealthCare -- that wanted higher state payments for Medicaid patients.
More than a year ago Partners, the dominant hospital provider, formed an alliance with Blue Cross, the dominate insurer. As part of their last contract negotiations, Blue Cross agreed to help Partners persuade the Legislature to raise the Medicaid rate. They hired John Sasso, the low-key but effective strategist to get it done.
Connors got rich building a Boston ad agency, Hill Holliday. But he is equally passionate about Partners HealthCare. His goal when Partners and Blue Cross launched their campaign: $100 million in new money for the state's hospitals the first year, $200 million the second and $300 million the third year. What they got: $90 million, $180 million, $270 million -- and they did it, to their own surprise, in a single year. What Partners' share of that first $90 million is remains to be determined in the bill. A good guess is $15 million to $20 million. The deal got done, by the way, on the same day that Partners was reporting profits tripled for the first quarter.
A good question is how Jack Connors came to Sal DiMasi with that $300 number. The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation calculated that the companies that did not insure their workers were costing the state $295 per employee, which became the final number. But $300 was also used in a Boston Globe editorial on the very day that Connors called DiMasi. It also doesn't take a genius to figure that the midpoint between $600, DiMasi's number, and zero, the business community's starting place, is $300.
Bigger deals have been done on less.
Steve Bailey can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902. 
