The Socialists know what they are doing /s
OBAMA AS NURSE HURT: 'What part of the Constitution can we trash today?'
Posted on 12/23/2010, 5:39:44 AM by 2ndDivisionVet
UNLESS SOMEONE can drop into Anthony Kennedy’s dreamspace and, “Inception”-style, either figure out what he thinks of the individual mandate or simply tell him what to think of the individual mandate, it’s not worth spending much time speculating on the ultimate legal fate of the provision. The case will eventually make its way to the Supreme Court, and when it does, Kennedy will decide which side has the majority, and until that happens, the various legal decisions are little different from op-ed columns.
So rather than sit around and wonder about a world without an individual mandate, let’s talk about a world that has one. We don’t have to go into hypotheticals to get there. We just have to go to Massachusetts.
In 2006, then-governor Mitt Romney signed a major health-care reform bill into law. “An achievement like this comes around once in a generation,” he said. “Today, Massachusetts is leading the way with health insurance for everyone, without a government takeover and without raising taxes.”
Romney was right about all of that. And national Democrats took notice. The health-reform bill President Barack Obama signed into law this year was explicitly based on the Massachusetts reforms. The theory was this: A plan that a Republican governor could sign into law would be a plan that could attract Republican votes.
The theory was wrong. An approach to universal coverage that represented “health insurance for everyone without a government takeover” when it was signed by a Republican governor in Massachusetts was spun by congressional Republicans as the missing final chapter of “The Communist Manifesto” when Democrats tried to scale it nationally.
Given that the plan was enacted anyway, it’s time to check in on how Massachusetts is doing. And the answer, basically, is pretty well. This week, the state’s health and human services agency released the results of a new, independent survey examining coverage in Massachusetts. More than 98 percent — 98 percent! — of the state’s residents now have health insurance, as do more than 99 percent of the state’s children.
Remarkably, those numbers have gotten better in recent years, with the number of uninsured residents in the state falling to 1.9 percent in 2010 from 2.6 percent in 2008. That’s very unusual. Normally, the ranks of the uninsured swell during recessions as people lose their jobs and states cut back on public programs to balance their budgets. Nationally, the number of American adults who are uninsured rose to 16.76 percent in 2010 from 14.8 percent in 2008, according to Gallup.
That Massachusetts’s reforms have survived, and even prospered, in this economic environment has left the law’s architects feeling vindicated. “The goal of the law was covering people,” says Jonathan Gruber, an MIT health economist who worked on the legislation, “and it couldn’t have gone better.”
By and large, that’s reflected in the polling. The Massachusetts reforms have consistently polled between the high-50s and mid-60s. Perhaps their most impressive showing came amidst now-Sen. Scott Brown’s candidacy, when a Washington Post-Kaiser-Harvard poll found that even though a majority of Massachusetts voters disapproved of the national reform effort, a majority of them — and even a majority of Brown’s supporters - approved of the Massachusetts law.
The law does have its problems. In particular, it was not designed to control costs. “That’s one of the areas where the federal bill is just better than the Massachusetts bill,” Gruber says. So costs in the state have continued to rise — with one notable exception that has a lot to say about our current debate over the individual mandate.
Like the federal law, the Massachusetts law left most people’s health arrangements alone. The exception: people who don’t get their coverage through a large employer or a public program. That accounts for most of the uninsured. It’s also where the individual mandate is primarily in play and where the “exchanges” — the purchasing markets that put individuals and small businesses in a single pool and force insurers to compete for their business and treat them fairly — really matter.
In Massachusetts, that market has worked better than expected. According to data from America’s Health Insurance Plans, the largest health insurer trade group, premiums for that market have fallen by 40 percent since the reforms were put in place. Nationally, those premiums have risen by 14 percent.
There are a couple of reasons for Massachusetts’ success. One is that the market is more transparent, and so insurers are competing more aggressively against one another. Jon Kingsdale, who ran the new health-care market, notes that the lower-cost plans have been much more popular than the higher-cost plans. The bigger reason is that the individual mandate — plus the combining of individual and small firms in the same insurance market — brought healthier, younger people into the mix, which brought average premiums down for everybody.
All is not roses and waterlilies for Massachusetts, of course. The reforms didn’t address a number of problems: The state had, on average, the highest health-care costs before reform, and it has the highest health-care costs today. (There are a variety of reasons for this, many of them having to do with the power of the state’s renowned hospitals.) Waiting rooms were overcrowded before, and they’re overcrowded today. And there are places where the reforms didn’t work as hoped. Predictions that expensive emergency room visits would drop now that people could go to the doctor have not been borne out.
The national law is better on at least some of those counts. It has provisions to expand the medical workforce, particularly the ranks of general practitioners. It has a slew of cost-control efforts, including a tax on expensive health insurance plans, an independent board able to make cost-cutting reforms to Medicare, a vast array of changes to the health-care delivery system, changes designed to get us away from paying for volume and toward paying for quality and much more.
But the reality is that there’s one way in which it could get much worse: if Republican judges strike out the individual mandate, and Republican congressmen refuse to work with Democrats on a replacement. In that world, the law can limp along, and it will still cover tens of millions of Americans, but premiums will be higher, the insurance markets will be less competitive and many of the bill’s cost controls will not have the chance they need to work.
So repeat after me, “Justice Kennedy: You’re getting very sleepy . . . ”
Ezra Klein, a former associate editor at the American Prospect, writes a Washington Post blog on issues covering economic policy, banks, cap and trade, and health-care reform.
How does long-term socialism look? Check Massachusetts.
Oh hell, this place is a liberal pit. A word of advice; don't come here, ever, for any reason.
But spare a moment of pity for we few conservatives here, we lost souls...
Massachusetts also does not have the high illegal immigrant problem that we (AZ) does, or California, or other southern states bordering Mexico.
What do they do about people who are not citizens but take up residence and are revolving door patients?
And who can afford 10 percent and growing taxes?
Check again...
:-\
The Socialists know what they are doing /s
OBAMA AS NURSE HURT: 'What part of the Constitution can we trash today?'
>Oh hell, this place is a liberal pit. A word of advice; don’t come here, ever, for any reason.
***
far worse than here in Socal? You’re kidding right? There’s a saying “mexicans dont like the cold” and that’s why you, in MA, dont have the choice of fighting your way thru the entrance of the Home Depot, evading an army of illegals just to buy a cordless drill.
Ezra Klein is one of the “journo-list” liberals, so everything he says should be de-valued because of that right off the bat.
Secondly, it is outrageous of him to say even in jest “Justice Kennedy, you’re getting sleepy”. So he’s implying, even in jest, that he wants Justice Kennedy not to be on the Supreme Court when this case gets there????
What would a good liberal like Ezra Klein think of conservatives hoping to replace liberal judges for rulings to come on homosexual marriage, global warming, fairness doctrine type rulings, or a whole host of other issues????
I checked the cost of the equivalent plan offered by my employer at mahealthconnector.org using a local Boston area code of 02108 for my family of 3.
The monthly cost is $2045 as calculated there vs. the $310 I pay now.
Even their lowest cost plan is $869 vs my $310.
That cheapest plan has a $4000 deductible for a family plan and $10,000 annual out of pocket max for a family plan. You have to meet your deductible for emergency room visits and hospital stays and prescriptions. Maybe I’m not reading that right, but that just sounds outrageous.
“Read the comments.” Yup. Also take note: published in the Manchester UNION Leader.
Choice bits:
My son has the ‘free’ insurance Mass provides. He needed surgery, immediately according to his PCP. It took six weeks to get an appointment. Three hours waiting in a crowded, run down filthy waiting room. Surly receptionists who spoke broken English. Three minutes with the doctor to confirm that yes, he did need surgery immediately. Six more weeks to get another appointment.
On the day of surgery, a two hour wait before a fifteen minute hack session. No anesthesia, just Novocaine to remove four teeth that were embedded in bone and sinus cavities. Infection, no follow up care, six more weeks to get antibiotics, permanent nerve damage and no option to sue or even file a complaint because this insurance he was FORCED to accept doesn’t provide for any type of physician accountability.
So yeah, its great that 98% of the state is covered. Covered with substandard care, drowning in debt and with no legal recourse. Yippee.
- Linda, Jaffrey
Illegals are still clogging the emergency rooms, the Mass. Department of Revenue has a green light to browse everyone’s checkbook, day-laborers are fined $2,000 for not having insurance to the state’s liking—fines that, in some cases, they can’t pay, and which don’t go to helping them get that thing that the state wants them to have. Insurance premiums have gone up. The Massachusetts equivalents to Carol Shea-Porter can crow that a record number of citizens have “coverage” (which sometimes means a fine)—namely, more than ever are tagged and tracked by a government program.
But “coverage” does not mean treatment, as indeed neither Romney-care nor Obama-care guarantees that anyone gets treatment for anything. And in Massachusetts, getting actual treatment is harder than before.
- Spike, Brentwood NH
‘Cept most people I know who purchased insurance under the MA bill say it’s useless and not accepted by most doctors and hospitals, which makes it a worthless payment they have to pay or face fines or jail.
Oh wait, the one person I know who doesn’t have a car found a doctor 50 miles away willing to accept her insurance.
- Jay, Manchester
Costs will go down when government gets completely out of the health care system. Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare - they should all be shut down. Where in the constitution can any support for these programs be found?
Aside from this scumbag Ezra Klein's presumption that the rats on the court are completely in the tank and are therefore willing to dispense with any pretense that they give a rat's ass about the Constitution, there are too many laugh lines in this column to list them all. Nevertheless, here are a few of my favorites:
"The law does have its problems. In particular, it was not designed to control costs." (HAHAhahahaaaa..!
"The bigger reason is that the individual mandate... brought healthier, younger people into the mix, which brought average premiums down for everybody." (Well freaking duh! "From each according to..." etc. Pure communism.)
"All is not roses and waterlilies for Massachusetts, of course. The reforms didn’t address a number of problems: The state had, on average, the highest health-care costs before reform, and it has the highest health-care costs today." ("Costs"? Since when do communist rats care about "costs" anyway?)
"Predictions that expensive emergency room visits would drop now that people could go to the doctor have not been borne out." (To say the least! That situation got dramatically worse.)
"The national law is better on at least some of those counts. It has provisions to expand the medical workforce, particularly the ranks of general practitioners." (Huh? What... through lower standards? Affirmative action? Specialty quotas imposed on medical students?)
"It has a slew of cost-control efforts, including a tax on expensive health insurance plans..." (Health insurance plans that allow you to avoid a 6 month wait for an MRI, for example.)
"...an independent board able to make cost-cutting reforms..." (Death panels. Period. That is what they are.)
“Costs will go down when government gets completely out of the health care system. Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare - they should all be shut down.”
I think that’s absolutely correct. What we’re heading for is this:
Everybody will be forced to buy health “insurance” from the government (because private insurers will no longer be able to compete).
Employers will no longer insure anyone (because the government will drive out all the insurance companies).
So the middle class will be paying for useless insurance policies that support all the welfare cases and when anyone in the middle class needs a doctor or hospital they will have to pay out-of-pocket — as long as it’s still possible for a doctor to treat individuals on a fee basis.
So, the government will no longer be in debt for healthcare costs because the enforced “insurance” premiums will pay for the indigent. Meanwhile, the middle class (if the Kulaks still exist) will pay their own way.
oh. But then the ACLU will sue the hospitals and doctors because it’s not fair.
One big difference between national socialized health care and MassCare. There won’t be any states next door maintaining the exceptionalism of private practice medicine and research.
The real question is can the federal government demand you to engage in commerces?
Add TennCare to the list..another gov’t failure at socialized medicine.
Comrade Kleinski’s Pravda article spouts the Party line very well. Too bad its total BS.
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