Guaranteed Healthcare

In New York, health insurance corporations are conspiring to cheat patients, and in California Blue Cross Blue Shield wanted doctors to violate patient confidentiality.

So it should come as no surprise that the insurers’ scheme to get everyone in Massachusetts to purchase their products isn’t working out as well as some hoped.  Many patients still can't afford the expensive, wasteful, junk insurance they're forced to buy...leaving the state one option: jack up penalties so that patients can't afford NOT to buy them.

We'll take a look below...

The activists at Massachusetts Health for All report that there’s a meeting of the “Connector” today, which is the board that oversees the state’s mandate plan, and they’re going to deal with the wildly out-of-control costs of the program. 

Who’s going to bear the burden for these insurance overruns…wait for it, wait for it…patients!  Premiums are going up, co-pays are going up, and penalties for not purchasing health insurance are going up.  In many cases, the hikes are 100%...and that is just this year.  The activists write:

Raising copays and premiums places the burden of financing the increasing costs of coverage on the poorest and sickest residents of the Commonwealth. It’s bad medically (a study concluded “chronically ill people cut their medications between 8 percent and 23 percent when their copayments are doubled”). It’s regressive. It’s unfair.

The good news?  The crushing defeat of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mandate plan in California suggested the idea is a political loser, and now the example in Massachusetts proves the idea is a policy loser.  Let me be clear: individual mandates will never and can never pass at the federal level.  If that's your plan, time to get back to the drawing board. 

And if, Jon Gruber, the MIT economist who provided much of the intellectual firepower for mandate-based plans, wrote your healthcare plan, it's time to fire him.  A new study finds he relied on shoddy data and incorrect assumptions in his work.  Gruber relied on 30-year-old data to suggest that people need to be stopped from using too much healthcare (?!?!), and he assumed pie-in-the-sky numbers that private insurers only have 12% overhead.  How an economist believes that you can both preserve 30% overhead and profits for insurers *and* provide healthcare for everyone is beyond me.

Meanwhile, momentum for genuine healthcare reform continues.  The Salt Lake Tribune argues that single-payer is a simpler system than corporate insurance mandates, myths about Canada's healthcare system get busted, and Brad Warthen at The State in South Carolina continues his campaign for single-payer, writing:

Increasingly, those of us who are privileged to be in the (health insurance) system find that we can't afford health care, either. The whole system is rotten, wasteful, too expensive and too inefficient. We pay more money to be sicker than folks in any other advanced nation.