Lessons from Massachusetts
This is from Grace-Marie Turner:
- High costs: On average, health insurance now costs $14,723 for a family of four in Massachusetts, nearly 12 percent higher than the national average.
- Rising costs: John Cogan of Stanford University and colleagues found that since the state’s reform initiative passed, premiums for private employer-sponsored health insurance increased by six percent than the nation as a whole. For small-group coverage costs grew 14 percent more.
- Dropping insurance: Some small employers are dropping health insurance and sending their workers into the taxpayer-funded health insurance pool.
- More ER visits: According to new state data, emergency room visits rose by 9 percent from 2004 to 2008, to about three million visits a year.
- Less access to care: Last year only 44 percent of internal medicine practices were accepting new patients, down from 66 percent in 2005, according to the Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy.
- Gaming the system: The Massachusetts Division of Insurance reported in June that the number of people who are buying coverage for short periods more than quadrupled in the three years since passage of the state’s reform law, driving up costs for others.
Proponents are so enamored with the Massachusetts model of health reform that they don’t view it as a pilot project that we should examine and learn from. Rather, backers of Massachusetts-style reforms believe it will somehow work if applied to the entire country. The only left-leaning group that admits the Massachusetts model is failing is the single-payer people.
Not a pretty picture.
I don’t see anything here that we should copy.
There is an op ed in the New York Times today by one of the designers of the Massachusetts Heath Plan, encouraging other states to jump start the creation of their health insurance exchnges. So I suppose that the Massachusetts experiment still has its defenders.
John, what you neglected to say (probably because you assume all the readers at this blog already know the fact) is that the Massachusetts Health Plan is the model for Obama Care. That why the “lessons” are so important.
This is a good summary of the case against Romney/Obama Care.
” Some small employers are dropping health insurance and sending their workers into the taxpayer-funded health insurance pool.”
Some is interesting. How many?
Steve
The Massachusetts health reform law foreshadows the serious problems our country faces with implementation of ObamaCare. Here’s a link to our paper at the Galen Institute with more details on the costs and consequences of RomneyCare in Massachusetts.
http://www.galen.org/fileuploads/MA_July2010.pdf
And the little known fact that gets constantly forgotten or purposely hidden by proponents is that high percentage of Massachusetts citizens already had healthcare insurance. All Romneycare did was move the needle from 94% in 2006 (year of enactment) to 97% (at what looks like it was the peak in early 2009) and back down to 96% as of 2010 (not sure becasue state is two months late releasing the data, which tells you something right there).
To the list above, you need to also add much higher costs to the state itself (and to the Federal government in some manner only a lawyer could love), doctors bailing out of the system, insurers going broke, insurers dropping customers (flipside of employers dropping insurers), the “exchange” rigging the market against other brokers, and on and on.
Remember it was a Mass State employee — a brave employee — who called it a “train wreck,” not the Wall Street Journal.