Posted on 08/09/2012 4:01:54 AM PDT by grundle
Under the plan, all Massachusetts doctors, hospitals and other providers must register with a new state bureaucracy as a condition of licensure—that is, permission to practice. They'll be required to track and report their financial performance, price and cost trends, state-sanctioned quality measures, market share and other metrics.
Massachusetts takes 360-degree surveillance and converts it into a panopticon prison. An 11-member board known as the Health Policy Commission will use the data to set and enforce rules to ensure that total Massachusetts health spending, public and private, grows no more than projected gross state product through 2017, and 0.5 percentage points lower thereafter.
No registered provider is allowed to make "any material change to its operations or governance structure," the bill says, without the commission's approval. The commission can also rewrite the terms of provider contracts with insurers and payment levels and methods if they are "deemed to be excessive."
As the commission polices the market, it can decide to supervise the behavior of any provider that exceeds some to-be-specified individual benchmark—that is, doctors and hospitals that are spending too much on patient care. These delinquents must submit a "performance improvement plan" that the commission must endorse.
In other words, the commission is empowered to control the practice and organization of medicine.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Sooooo bookmarked.
True. But this new law is considered as the natural outcome of Romneycare, even though Romney himself did not create this new law.
I was thinking the same thing.
This is a surprise only to those ignorant of history; the State Machinery of a Marxist government invariably expands until it border on - and eventually crosses - the line of tyranny.
Wonder what the Founders think of all this....
He might even be able to get my vote.
Of course this is part of “nose under the tent” and all that jazz, and of course gov’t destroys what it touches, but all I did was to state the fact that this particular piece of legislation was NOT part of the original bill, nor were a bunch of other mandates enacted since, like prescription medication. I’ll kick Romney for what he did, but he shouldn’t bear the burden of Deval’s bills as well.
I agree with you that anyone who studies how government grows and grows and grows would not be surprised by this. But there are a lot of ignorant people who haven’t studied history very much.
OK. you’re right. It’s not fair to blame Ronmey for this new law. But it is perfectly OK to make the observation that this new law is what one would expect to come after Romneycare. Whenever government legislation causes a problem, we can expect that the government will try to pass even more legislation to “fix” it, instead of repealing the bad legislation that caused the problem in the first place.
So will old conservatives, medicare is the only option for the non rich.
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