What RomneyCare Did in Massachusetts:

[amborin]

Congress Copying Massachusetts' Failing Healthcare?

WASHINGTON - July 21 -
STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER

Woolhandler is a primary care physician at Cambridge Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School who has studied and written about the Massachusetts healthcare plan.

She said today: "As Washington politicians climb on-board a Massachusetts-style health reform, Massachusetts healthcare sinks.

"Congress seems poised to include an individual mandate in health reform, copying Massachusetts. Here, beating your wife, communicating a terrorist threat and being uninsured all carry $1,000 fines.

"The 2006 Massachusetts reform halved the state's already low uninsurance rate -- mostly by expanding Medicaid and similar programs at great public expense.

"But reform hasn't made care affordable for middle class families, or for the public treasury. A middle income uninsured 56-year-old is now forced to lay out at least $4,800 for a policy with a $2,000 deductible before it pays for any care, and 20 percent co-payments after that. Overpriced, skimpy coverage like this left one in six Massachusetts residents unable to pay their medical bills last year. Among INSURED residents in the state, 18 percent say they skipped care because they couldn't afford it.

"Meanwhile, health costs continue to rise; our state Senate is planning to drop 28,000 people from the insurance rolls, and public hospitals and clinics have suffered draconian cuts as the governor diverts their funding to shore up the reform. The state just cut the budget of Boston Medical Center, the state's largest safety net provider, by $180 million. Cuts to Cambridge Health Alliance, the second largest safety net provider, have forced closure of half of its psychiatric services and six of its community clinics.

"Massachusetts' experience prefigures the ugly reality of the reform plans on the table in Washington. Searching for the $100-$150 billion extra they'd need each year just to cover the uninsured, Congress threatens to tax health benefits for those who are currently insured, effectively increasing the price. And they'd drain Medicare and Medicaid funds from safety net hospitals, anticipating a sharp drop in those unable to pay for care -- a drop that never really materialized in Massachusetts."


http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/07/21-18


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Doctors Give Massachusetts Health Reform a Failing Grade - Poor Early Outcomes Raise Red Flags, Only Private Insurers Profit

January 14 - Over 250 Massachusetts doctors have signed an open letter to the country warning that the health reform model enacted by Massachusetts is failing and that a single payer program is the only alternative.


�It is urgent that the rest of the country know that Massachusetts is a living laboratory for the health care reforms being pushed in California and by the Obama/Clinton/Edwards campaigns. Right now the Gov. Romney/Massachusetts� plan gets a failing grade on the ground,� said Dr.Rachel Nardin, Assistant Professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.


An Open Letter to the Nation from Massachusetts Physicians:
Early Outcomes from Massachusetts� Health Care Reform
We write to alert colleagues and the nation to the disturbing early outcomes of Massachusetts� widely-heralded approach to health care reform. Although we wish that the current reform could secure health insurance for all, its failings reinforce our conviction that only a single payer program can assure patients the care they need.

In 2006, our state enacted a law designed to extend health coverage to virtually all state residents. Political leaders in other states as well as several Democratic presidential candidates have embraced this model.

Massachusetts� law mandates that uninsured individuals must purchase private insurance or pay a fine. The law established a new state agency to ensure that affordable plans were available; offered low income residents subsidies to help them buy coverage; and expanded Medicaid coverage for the very poor. (Immigrants are mostly excluded from these subsidized programs.) Moneys that previously funded free care for the uninsured were shifted to the new insurance program, along with revenues from new fines on employers who fail to offer health benefits to their workers. In addition, the federal government provided extra funds for the program�s first two years.

Starting January 1, 2008 Massachusetts residents face fines if they cannot offer proof of insurance. Yet as of December 1, 2007 only 37% of the 657,000 uninsured had gained coverage under the new program. These individuals often feel well served by the reform in that they now have health insurance. However, 79% of these newly insured individuals are very poor people enrolled in Medicaid or similar free plans. Virtually all of them were previously eligible for completely free care funded by the state, but face co-payments under the new plan. In effect, public funds for care of the poor that previously flowed directly to hospitals and clinics now flow through insurers with their higher administrative costs.

Among the near poor uninsured (who are eligible for partial premium subsidies) only 16% had enrolled in the new coverage. And barely 7% of the uninsured individuals with incomes too high to qualify for subsidies had enrolled according to the official state figures. Few can afford premiums for even the skimpiest coverage; the lowest cost plan offered for a couple in their fifties costs $8,200 annually, and carries a $2,000 per person deductible.

Moreover, the state�s cost for subsidies is running $147 million over the $472 million budgeted for fiscal year 2007. Meanwhile, collections from fines on employers who fail to provide coverage are 80% below the original projections. The funding gap will widen in future years as health care costs escalate and insurers raise premiums. Already, state officials speak of making up the shortfall by forcing patients to pay sharply higher co-pays and deductibles, and by slashing funds promised to safety net hospitals.

While patients, the state and safety net providers struggle, private insurers have prospered under the new law, and the costs of bureaucracy have risen. Blue Cross, the state�s largest insurer, is reaping a surplus of more than $1 million each day, and awarded its chairman a $16.4 million retirement bonus even as he continues to draw a $3 million salary. All of the major insurers in our state continue to charge overhead costs five times higher than Medicare and eleven-fold higher than Canada�s single payer system. Moreover, the new state agency that brokers private coverage adds its own surcharge of 4.5% to each policy it sells.

A single payer program could save Massachusetts more than $9 billion annually on health care bureaucracy, making universal coverage affordable. But because the 2006 law deepened our dependence on private insurance, it can only add coverage by adding costs. Though politically feasible, this approach is already proving fiscally unsustainable. The next economic downturn will push up the number of uninsured just as the tax revenues needed to fund subsidies fall.


http://www.commondreams.org/news2008/0114-08.htm

[tabatha]

1. But Romney says Obamacare is not like it.

[bvar22]

2. QED.

The current push to force this terrible bill through reconciliation reminds me of The Charge of the Light Brigade.

By the way, they were all killed.

[laughingliberal]

6. Yeah, but there was a nice poem written about them. nt

[progressoid]

3. marking this for a later read.

[demosincebirth]

4. Wasn't he sort of a liberal republican, then?

[frazzled]

5. What drivel

The Boston Globe thinks otherwise:

Mass. bashers take note: Health reform is working

DITS and politicians who oppose universal healthcare for the nation have a new straw man to kick around - the Massachusetts reform plan that covers more than 97 percent of the state’s residents. In the myth that these critics have manufactured, this state’s plan is bleeding taxpayers dry, creating nothing less than a medical Big Dig.

The facts - according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation - are quite different. Its report this spring put the cost to the state taxpayer at about $88 million a year, less than four-tenths of 1 percent of the state budget of $27 billion. Yes, the state recently had to cut benefits for legal immigrants, and safety-net hospital Boston Medical Center has sued for higher state aid. But that is because the recession has cut state revenues, not because universal healthcare is a boondoggle. The main reason costs to the state have been well within expectations? More than half of all the previously uninsured got coverage by buying into their employers’ plans, not by opting for one of the state-subsidized plans.

This should be exciting news for those fiscal conservatives, including both Republicans and “blue dog’’ Democrats, who claim to support the goal of universal coverage while despairing over its budget impact. But that’s not what you hear from the Massachusetts bashers. Trying to scare off the nation from helping the uninsured get coverage, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said recently, “You don’t have to look any further than the universal healthcare mess in Massachusetts to see disaster ahead.’’ New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on Monday accused President Obama of “pushing a health plan that looks a lot like the system currently hemorrhaging money in Massachusetts.’’

<...>

There is one other statistic about the Massachusetts plan that politicians, in particular, should appreciate. According to Robert Blendon of the Harvard School of Public Health and the Kennedy School of Government, the law’s approval rating in June 2008 was 69 percent. That is a figure officeholders can only dream about.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/08/05/mass_bashers_take_note_health_reform_is_working/

Furthermore, the Massachusetts reform was unlike the reform Washington is considering now, because they chose to address coverage only in Massachusetts--not costs. The federal health care bill is addressing both, plus putting in strong regulatory oversight over insurance companies.

Please, Common Dreams. What a joke that rag has been for years.

Read also Governor Deval Patrick's editorial in the WSJ:

When we in Massachusetts set out to change our system, some were afraid. People almost always fear change, and politicians sometimes seize on that fear to prevent it. But in an act of political courage, a Democratic senator, a Republican governor and a Democratic state legislature formed a broad coalition with health-care providers, medical experts, business and labor leaders and patient advocates to fundamentally reform our system. And we have maintained our coalition as we've moved forward. After many years of widespread dissatisfaction with the old health-care system, we realized that a perfect solution or the status quo were not our only choices.

Because of our reform, over 97% of Massachusetts residents are insured—the highest rate of coverage of any state in the nation. Our residents now have better access to preventive care in lower cost primary-care settings. Employers have expanded coverage for workers, not retreated as some feared. Families are less likely to be forced into bankruptcy by medical costs. Most importantly, lives have been saved. This is all good news for our residents, as well as for our state's long-term economic prosperity.

Opponents of reform claim that the Massachusetts experiment is too costly. They are wrong. State estimates and independent analysis from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation concur that health-care reform has only added moderate incremental costs to the state budget. As more of our residents have become insured, there has been a decrease in demand for costly emergency-room care. Even in the midst of the current economic downturn, our state budget was balanced.

But the real issue is not the incremental costs of expanding coverage. It's the fact that medical costs—even for those who have always had insurance—are rising too fast.

Massachusetts is poised to lead the nation in addressing this problem, too. A special state commission has unanimously recommended moving away from the "fee for service" practice that drives up costs and fragments care, and replacing it with an alternative payment strategy designed to reward doctors and hospitals for providing coordinated care that achieves the best health outcomes for patients and lowers costs. As we work to translate this vision into practice, health care in the state will just get better.

We are proud of our success in Massachusetts. But we are also deeply committed to supporting federal health-care reform that will tackle costs and establish important patient protections to guard against some of the worst insurance-industry practices, including exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, co-pays and deductibles that drive many families into bankruptcy. Working families and businesses have been waiting too long for relief.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405252468577402.html

[laughingliberal]

7. Mitt?

:hi:

[frazzled]

8. No, Deval Patrick and the Boston Globe

Name calling is soooo lame.