A football coach before entering politics, he legislated victories on health care and same-sex marriage.
By Adam Bernstein Adam Bernstein Obituary editor Email Bio Follow April 7 at 4:33 PM Michael E. Busch, a former parochial school and collegiate football star who parlayed his esteem on the gridiron into a political career, becoming the longest-serving state House speaker in Maryland history and helping shepherd laws there that improved access to health care and legalized same-sex marriage, died April 7 at a hospital in Baltimore. He was 72.
Mr. Busch made perhaps his greatest impact on health care, championing Maryland’s “all-payer” hospital system, in which all insurers pay a hospital the same rate for the same service or procedure. He also was a leader on broadening mandates for insurers well before the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in 2010.
He was elected to the House of Delegates in 1986, joking that he owed his triumph to votes from every kid he “taught, coached, refereed or tossed out of the swimming pool . . . in Annapolis between 1972 and 1979.” Mr. Busch and Miller stood on opposing sides during the legislature’s long and tortured debate over gambling in Maryland — which the speaker vociferously opposed and the president enthusiastically favored. The slot machines that had once proliferated on the Eastern Shore and in Southern Maryland were banned in 1968, and ever since, there had been efforts to reinstate them.
But four years later, with the urging of Gov. Martin O’Malley and the grudging deference of Mr. Busch to his newly elected Democratic gubernatorial colleague, the House approved legislation that paved the way for a referendum on legalizing slot machines. The voters overwhelmingly approved the measure, which was presented as a way to close a $1.5 billion budget shortfall.
“Miller was playing chicken,” Eberly continued, “but Busch didn’t blink. There were two special sessions, first on the budget and then on gambling because Busch wasn’t willing to equate the two.” “I thought to myself, ‘They’re right,’ ” Mr. Busch told The Post. “People have always put barriers in front of people who are different.”
“When he redrew the districts, he made his seat safer,” Eberly said. “He’s a survivor and used the process to his advantage.”
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