IBD: Bay State Rationing

INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY/EDITORIAL, 7/16/2009 - Health Care: Massachusetts' universal medical program is no longer universal. Coverage is being dropped for 30,000 because not enough money is around to pay for everyone. There's a lesson in this for Congress.

IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure

Unable to pay the enormous cost of Commonwealth Care, the state's subsidized insurance plan for low-income residents, Massachusetts lawmakers are throwing legal immigrants off the rolls. The state simply does not have enough money to pay its bills, and cuts have to be made somewhere.

Three years ago, Massachusetts enacted a law that required every resident to have medical insurance. Commonwealth Care was created to subsidize those who couldn't afford to buy their own. It didn't take long for the program, which never achieved coverage for everyone, to run into trouble.

Costs soared from $158 million in the first year to $630 million in 2007, then doubled in 2009 to $1.3 billion. Enrollment in the program has also surged. It stands at roughly 181,000, up from 165,000 in the early spring, and is projected to reach 212,000 next year.

With 200,000 still uninsured — most of whom likely would be eligible for the subsidized program — imagine how much more steeply the costs would be rising if the state had met its goal of insuring everyone.

Both Democrats and Republicans hailed Massachusetts' attempt to ensure that everyone had medical insurance coverage. Some on the right even praised the state for taking a market-based approach to the issue.

A few observers, however, correctly noted that such a system cannot possibly be sustained. Demand, they said, will overwhelm it, just as demand has caused medical care rationing in Great Britain and Canada.

Eva Millona, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition, told the New York Times that one possible outcome of the Massachusetts situation is "the message that health care reform cannot be done, period."

Actually, that's the only message, if reform means increasing government's role. That message comes to us from across the Atlantic, from north of our border and now from within our own republic.

What Massachusetts is learning is exactly what Washington will learn if it enacts the public option legislation being debated on Capitol Hill: The taxpayers are not an unending font of dollars; their inability to float costlier statist political schemes will eventually cause deficits.

Do not put faith in promises of care for everyone at lower costs. They are false. Universal care will always increase costs and lead to rationing because it invites system overload. This is the message, and it must be spread before lawmakers do something foolish. Read More......

What We Talk About When We Talk About Health Care

WASHINGTON POST, 6/24/2009 by Drew Westen (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) - "Universal health care." "The uninsured." "Public option." These are the buzzwords you often hear from Democrats and proponents of President Obama's plan for health-care reform. But if they want to see that plan enacted, they'd do well to excise those phrases from their vocabulary. ∴ Words send messages, but they're not always the messages we intend. Recent polls show overwhelming support for health-care reform, including the "public option" in Obama's plan. But the reality is that which side prevails in this battle will probably depend as much on which one has its messaging right as on which has its policies right. ∴ Republicans and other opponents of Obama's plan are already operating on this assumption, guided by a memo on "the language of health care" that conservative wordsmith Frank Luntz circulated to GOP members on Capitol Hill last month. In it, he conceded that the American public wants real reform and argued that the only way Republicans can defeat Obama's plan is by co-opting the language of reform, describing the president's plan as a "government takeover" and painting it as a bureaucrat's dream and a patient's nightmare. Read more at the Washington Post... Read More......

Prognosis: Debt

WASHINGTON POST, 6/22/2009 by Fred Hiatt (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler, "More on health care -- and debt.") - Universal Coverage Demands Real Savings ... ∴ If you listened to President Obama addressing the American Medical Association last week, you might think that the primary purpose of health-care reform is, as he said, "to control the spiraling cost of health care in America." ∴ Obama spoke passionately about the damage that rising costs cause to families, businesses and the economy. He insisted that if Congress passes legislation that fails to change how America practices and pays for care, it will "not earn the title of reform." Not until the sixth page of an 8 1/2 -page speech did he come to the subject of extending coverage to all Americans. Read more at the Washington Post... Read More......

MavGillis: A Red State Booster Shot

WASHINGTON POST, 6/1/2009 by Alec MacGillis - Those in the red states still smarting over Barack Obama's election victory can perhaps take solace in this: The Democrats' No. 1 domestic policy initiative, universal health care, is likely to help red America at the expense of blue. Read more at the Washington Post...

Hat tip: John H. Detweiler
John says, "Irony?" Read More......