Tendo City

Quote:Nation’s ill-advised to follow Mass. plan
By Michael Graham | Thursday, September 17, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Op-Ed

The canary is dead.

Massachusetts, the model for the ObamaCare universal insurance plan, is the canary in the health care coal mine. Yesterday, its obit appeared on the front page of both The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe-Democrat.

Both papers reported that our Commonwealth Care reform isn’t working as planned. A new law that was supposed to control costs and drive prices down (sound familiar?) has instead sent costs soaring.

Under the “beta” version of ObamaCare here in Massachusetts, premiums have jumped 7 to 12 percent just this year. That’s about twice the national average - and it’s bad news for Bay State families who were already paying the nation’s highest premiums. If the swine flu season turns ugly, our premiums could go even higher.

As Tim O’Brien of Blue Cross Blue Shield’s Boston office put it, “Reform has had some unexpected results.”

I wonder if this guy’s covered for Chronic Understatement Syndrome.

And it’s not just premiums that are rising. Massachusetts has accomplished the president’s goal of insuring the uninsured. More than 400,000 have joined the ranks of the insured (half under free or subsidized plans), leaving merely 3 percent of our population uninsured. That’s the good news.

But the hair-on-fire bad news is how much this is costing taxpayers. A plan that in 2006 was projected to cost “a small amount of new money in the first few years” according to the Globe-Democrat (Chronic Understatement Syndrome strikes again!) is costing more than $1 billion today.

Why? Because as Massachusetts discovered, when you give people taxpayer-subsidized insurance, they buy it! And they’re going to do the same at the national level. Only it will be worse for ObamaCare because about 15 percent of the country is uninsured - a far higher percentage than we had in Massachusetts.

Just check this math from health policy expert James C. Capretta: A family at 200 percent of the federal poverty line - $44,100 for a family of four in 2009 - would be required to sign up with insurance costing about $13,375. Under the plan put forth by Sen. Max Baucus, the family’s premium would be capped at about 8 percent of their income, or $3,538. The rest of of the cost - nearly $10,000 - would be paid by the federal government.

That’s 10K per year, per family. And by “federal government” he of course means “The Department Of Grab Your Wallet And Cough.”

Massachusetts passed health care reform to bring down our costs, but families who were paying $650 a month three years ago are paying close to $1,000 now.

Reform was supposed to help taxpayers. But according to The Wall Street Journal, the state’s “overall costs on health programs have increased by 42 percent (!) since 2006.”

Reform was supposed to get more people insured, and it has. But it has also made insurance so expensive for non-subsidized middle-class families that they’re forced to drop coverage.

That’s what’s actually happening here in the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Lab. So why would anyone want to replicate this mess at the national level?

The reason coal miners got canaries was so if the poor thing keeled over, they could save themselves. Please, Mr. President, check the canary before it’s too late.

Anyone up for a fiscal disaster?

Of course, I believe national health care could work. I propose that it be funded by taxing the incomes of all supporters of the concept at about 75%.

And this is why the public option is so important, without it private insurers will NOT keep costs down or make it cheaper for consumers.

This is also why the insurance industry and all the politicians they have bought off are fighting the public option so hard, they know that it'd be the beginning of the end of the moneymaking, patient-hurting scam they've been running for several decades now...

We have to let the government make costs skyrocket so that the private insurers don't get to do it?

No, the government is the only one who has a chance of really making health care better. For-profit health care companies benefit by denying care to sick people, it's the core of their profit-making business... along with things like giving people drugs they don't need, etc.

Government health care would not be perfect, but it would actually be focused on helping people, not just making money. And that's the key difference, and that's why things which simply require everyone to get private insurance don't work. All that really does is increases the number of people insurance companies can make money off of... you need something there to keep them focused on waht they should be doing, making people better, not on satisfying Wall Street profit expectations. Of course you need to pay attention to money... but not the way they do. Most other Western nations have better health care on average than we do for a reason, and we spend more on it per capita than most of them too! That shows how we really don't need to spend more on health care, we just need to spend it better.

Of course some of the other hopeful changes would be good, such as making it so they can't drop coverage, deny people for their prior medical record, etc, but the question there will be if there are loopholes they can jump through. Hopefully not, but we'll see. I'm not too hopeful, but it should help at least some.

Anyway, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veteran's Administration are very good services. They have some money issues, but those are solvable... and compared to our completely broken private insurance industry, so focused on their own profits and not in patient health, they are shining examples of greatness. That they are far from that shows how bad our private insurance system is...

None of that optimism seems to be bearing fruit in Massachusetts.