Massachusetts, the first state in the nation to require all citizens to carry health insurance, is facing some tough economic decisions.
Three years after mandating that residents get health insurance and requiring employers, insurers and taxpayers to chip in, Massachusetts has yet to control soaring costs that are eating up half its budget.
Just 2.6% of state residents remain uninsured, compared with more than 15% nationally. That’s due in part to the 2006 law, which said most residents must get insurance, most employers must help provide it, and most taxpayers must help pay for it.
Due in part to the 2006 law? Ya think?
Dealing with cost and quality has proved trickier. Higher health care costs fueled a combined $9 billion gap in the state’s 2009 and 2010 budgets that had to be closed last month, leaving less for education, public safety, the environment and other services.
Quality has been an issue, too. Because more people have insurance, some doctors and safety-net hospitals are overwhelmed. A study by the non-partisan Urban Institute found one in five adults in the state have been turned away by a doctor’s office or clinic.
The major task facing Massachusetts now is the same one confronting the nation: controlling costs that were spiraling long before the 2006 law.
Expanding access to insurance has made that problem tougher by adding more than $700 million in annual costs, split evenly with the federal government, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. The annual cost to care for those who were uninsured in 2006 has risen from $1 billion to $1.7 billion.
Once people had insurance, the state reasoned, they would flee emergency rooms for neighborhood doctors and drug stores. As a result, state funds intended to pay safety-net hospitals and community health centers for serving the uninsured have been reduced by $660 million.
But if anything, demand has increased as the newly insured seek more medical attention. “The funding levels are not keeping pace with the volume that we’re seeing,” says William Halpin, CEO of South Boston Community Health Center. “There’s been a little bit of robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Boston Medical Center, the state’s largest provider to the poor, filed a lawsuit against the state last week charging that it’s getting only 64 cents on the dollar to care for low-income patients.
Now, if Obama and the Democrats want to sell their national health plan to the public as a moral imperative, that would be honest. Then there could be a fair argument about costs and benefits and how much we should extract from people’s paychecks to fund it. But they are selling it as a way for the government to hold down health care costs, and as we can see, that isn’t how the real world works.
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Mike, it’s atypical of everything socialist. It never has worked, isn’t working now, and never will work. I honestly believe that BHO has as his whole intent and purpose in life to totally bankrupt America. There’s a reason behind all this and it ain’t purty!
So lemme get this straight: The mandate that everyone buy an item, and are then surprised that the suppliers, knowing they have a captive market that must buy their product, raise the prices? And, having been forced to buy a product they wouldn’t voluntarily, people actually use it? Or worse, a product that is perceived as being “free” being handled to people who have no incentive to not use that product?
And why, if holding down costs is so important, are all their efforts at getting more slices out of a fixed (or shrinking) size pie when they should be working to increase the size of the pie?
The problem with the Left is that they think that can repeal laws of nature just because they aren’t as obvious as gravity is. To them, wishing will make it so if you throw enough money at it.
What is definitely missing is the cause/effect relationship with this administration and congress. They are treating the symptom and not the disease. High health costs have been in a large part due to government meddling. More meddling will only make it worse.
Band-aids and aspirin aren’t going to fix this disease. This is like taking methadone to cure a “drug habit”…. Going from one addiction to another.
So I’m confused – are we saying that it’s wrong for a state to require people to have insurance? I’m not sure I’m on board with that.
Sorry, Republibot. I thought I had made it clear that I was not talking about whether the law was good or bad, but that Obama is selling this as a way to save the government money, which is dishonest.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independance. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln
Depends on the type of insurance. In the case of auto or home owners, the insurance is required because there are third parties involved who could be harmed by your actions. (In the case of lenders, to property which they have an ownership stake.) The purpose of that insurance is not to make sure my car gets it’s oil changed periodically or that my house gets re-roofed every decade or so.
With so-called “health insurance”,there’s no such third party who will be harmed if I neglect or choose not to see a doctor for minor problems. (In most cases problems that will solve themselves and for which medical science has no solution, like colds.)
So called “health insurance” the way most people think of and use it is more of an extended warranty and long-term service contract. Not only are most extended warranties a bad deal, but the gov’t should not be in the business of requiring them.
(And please, don’t bring up family as a third party. At least not until after you’ve got to know my family…)
Nah, a family as a third party would be fore Life insurance, not Health. But Health insurance assumes a certain degreee of investment over the term of the policy to offset actual medical costs. For instance, if I’m 18, and I take out a policy and keep it until retirement, my premiums get invested by the company, and they keep the profits of that, which is how they pay their workers and their own shareholders. They assume the likelyhood of any major illness that will cost more to treat than they’ll make off of me in the 47 years I’ll have the policy in force to be relatively slight, so I’m a winning proposition for them. On the off chance they’re wrong, well, there the 80 or 90% of other insureds who are profitable enough to offset my own losses. The idea of doing that on a national scale, however, is…well…it’s probably theoretically possible, but it’s daunting, and Insurance Companies are allowed some quality control on the front end (No smokers, no juvenile onset paranoid schizophrenics, people with three arms elligiable only at a higher premium and without OB-GYN services, etc) which the Federal Government clearly clearly clearly couldn’t do. I’m not convinced it’s impossible, but it’d be quite a lot of trouble to borrow.