Posted on 04/05/2006 7:05:04 AM PDT by CSM
Tuesday, April 4, 2006 10:54 p.m. EDT Romney to Sign Mandatory Health Bill
BOSTON -- Lawmakers overwhelmingly approved a bill Tuesday that would make Massachusetts the first state to require that all its citizens have some form of health insurance.
The plan — approved just 24 hours after the final details were released — would use a combination of financial incentives and penalties to dramatically expand access to health care over the next three years and extend coverage to the state's estimated 500,000 uninsured.
If all goes as planned, poor people will be offered free or heavily subsidized coverage; those who can afford insurance but refuse to get it will face increasing tax penalties until they obtain coverage; and those already insured will see a modest drop in their premiums.
The measure does not call for new taxes but would require businesses that do not offer insurance to pay a $295 annual fee per employee.
The cost was put at $316 million in the first year, and more than a $1 billion by the third year, with much of that money coming from federal reimbursements and existing state spending, officials said.
The House approved the bill on a 154-2 vote. The Senate endorsed it 37-0.
A final procedural vote is needed in both chambers of the Democratic-controlled legislature before the bill can head to the desk of Gov. Mitt Romney, a potential Republican candidate for president in 2008. Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom said the governor would sign the bill but would make some changes that wouldn't "affect the main purpose of the bill."
Legislators praised the effort.
"It's only fitting that Massachusetts would set forward and produce the most comprehensive, all-encompassing health care reform bill in the country," said House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi, a Democrat. "Do we know whether this is perfect or not? No, because it's never been done before."
The only other state to come close to the Massachusetts plan is Maine, which passed a law in 2003 to dramatically expand health care. That plan relies largely on voluntary compliance.
"What Massachusetts is doing, who they are covering, how they're crafting it, especially the individual requirement, that's all unique," said Laura Tobler, a health policy analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The plan hinges in part on two key sections: the $295-per-employee business assessment and a so-called "individual mandate," requiring every citizen who can afford it to obtain health insurance or face increasing tax penalties.
Liberals typically support employer mandates, while conservatives generally back individual responsibility.
"The novelty of what's happened in this building is that instead of saying, `Let's do neither,' leaders are saying, `Let's do both,'" said John McDonough of Health Care for All. "This will have a ripple effect across the country."
The state's poorest — single adults making $9,500 or less a year — will have access to health coverage with no premiums or deductibles.
Those living at up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $48,000 for a family of three, will be able to get health coverage on a sliding scale, also with no deductibles.
The vast majority of Massachusetts residents who are already insured could see a modest easing of their premiums.
Individuals deemed able but unwilling to purchase health care could face fines of more than $1,000 a year by the state if they don't get insurance.
Romney pushed vigorously for the individual mandate and called the legislation "something historic, truly landmark, a once-in-a-generation opportunity."
One goal of the bill is to protect $385 million pledged by the federal government over each of the next two years if the state can show it is on a path to reducing its number of uninsured.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has threatened to withhold the money if the state does not have a plan up and running by July 1.
Nope, it's not. In a free society, it is up to the individual to provide for himself. It is up to society (government) to insure that no one intrudes upon his/her right to do so.
It is not up to the government to force an employer to provide a type of insurance (tax) that will provide inferior health care to all. It is not up to the State to "subsidize personal responsibility.... promote responsibility and insure the taxpayer that those who can pay, will." That is, unless you are a socialist.
God put you here. The rest is up to you. However I believe that charity is a very, very good thing. True hands-on charity, not 'government mandated - hands in your pocket' charity, teaches humility, thrift, and hard work. Real charity provides benefits to the giver and the reciever. Government theft provides no benefits.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
I didn't understand. Reword?
Point is, if employers such as yourself will not provide for a health-care plan as a benefit especially to employees with families, we are going to see much more government control and a national health-care system. Like it or not thats the direction we're moving. There are two choices your's, the third, has been rejected long ago. If the private sector drops the ball the government will pick it up and play.
Again I respond, society is much more than the civil government. Society is the sum total of individuals and voluntary associations, such as families, fraternities, churches, businesses, and so forth. The latter institutions, supported by voluntary contributions, tended to the poor and indigent. A person may have directly supported an indigent uncle, or paid his dues to the Elks or placed money in a poor box at church in the expectation that these funds would be used for relief. Government extracts taxes at the point of a gun. As George Washington put it, government is not reason or eloquence, but force.
If government does not have a hand in it and allowing the free market to reign what may be the outcome?
Government intervention is the antithesis of the free market. Government intervention can result in either direct nationalization or a highly regulated, but technically still privately owned, industry. The former way is Marxism. The latter way goes under many names: Fabian socialism, the "third way", dirigism, fascism, modern liberalism, mercantilism, and so forth. Under whatever name, it is still interventionism that results in inhibiting the function of the free market, the only historically proven means of efficient production and distribution of goods and services.
I would suggest you read some of the works of any of the great free market economists of the last century: Hayek, Mises, Friedman, Hazlitt, etc., for an extended discussion of the folly of government regulation.
Will the poor be treated as well as the rich? Or does that matter?
The last time I checked, the rich have better housing, clothing, and other goods and services than the poor. Even in Marxist countries, the political elite live far better than the proletariat who supposedly are the ruling class. Rest assured that Mrs. Brezhnev did not stand in line for hours to purchase fatty sausage or black bread. The difference between a nation with free markets and a highly regulated or socialist one is that in the former, the elite earned the benefits of wealth through hard work and wise investments, or that of their parents and grandparents. In the latter, landed aristocracy, political bigwigs, and those who know who to bribe, how much and when receive the blessings of government - basically looting under cover of law.
if in the course of this experiment we find ourselves tripping over the sick and the dying on the streets of this nation, have we succeeded?
We had over a century of charitable or market driven medical care in this country. Please cite a historical incidence of poor people dying in the streets in pre-Depression America. In fact, observers of American life in the 19th Century such as Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the relative absence of the squalor common in Old World cities. Despite our semi-socialized medical system, the downtown areas of many American cities are plagued with homeless people, most of whom are mentally ill or have drug and alcohol addiction. If government intervention is such an improvement over the free market, why are indigent and ill people more prevalent and obnoxious in 2006 than, say, in 1906?
Where fod costs are driven by technology that is cheaper and more productive than what it replaced the technology of medical care expands the scope of the possibilities of the health care industry.
Consider the fact that the mechanical and chemical technologies which improved food production were available worldwide. The Soviets invested in the technologies such as tractors, combines, pesticides, etc., as the Western democracies made them available to the Communist Bloc. Nevertheless, the USSR never achieved the level of food production that semi-free market Tsarist Russia had, despite over 70 years of trying. Food had to be imported from the hated capitalist nations like the U.S., Canada, and Australia.
In the medical business, goods such as advanced medical treatments have to bear the burden of the overhead in the industry, including personnel costs and liability insurance that are driven by state and Federal regulations and court decisions. If court decisions require hospitals to cover the medical costs of indigents, even those of illegal aliens, then the hospitals and other medical providers must find a means to cover the added costs. Thus, you wind up with the proverbial $10 aspirin pill and a per day cost of a hospital room that exceeds that of the fanciest hotels on the planet.
Simply stated, the technological advances in medicine in the last 50 years occurred in an environment of increasing government regulation and allocation of resources. There were great medical advances in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, X-rays, penicillin, etc., that did not drive up the cost of medicine. If the models of lightly regulated or free market industries, such as computers, electronics, and retail, were applied, it is likely that medical costs would not have risen to the extent they have.
What sort of luck have you had with the personal medical account. I find the idea intriguing, but I wonder what people will do if there is an unexpected major medical expense and they don't have the money saved.
I also wrote:
As it stands, those who could afford to purchase health insurance pay their own way when they get sick.
I was not referring to people like you or me who take responsibility for their lives.
We have been using the medical account for well over a year. This includes, emergency room visit for my son, new eyeglasses and contacts refill for me, dental visits for all my children and my youngest needed some minor dental surgery.
We kept a small database comparing costs to if we had traditional insurance. What would have been deducted from my husband's paycheck versus what we have paid in medical expenses since we switched....standard insurance would have been a few thousand more.
You have to make desposits to the medical account outside the deductions they do automatically. If there isn't enough money to cover the medical expense, the bill is sent to your home.
We have not thought of switching back to health insurance at all.
I will freep you the url to review.
>>>As it stands, those who could afford to purchase health insurance pay their own way when they get sick.
Yes, but a medical account is not health insurance.
This is about mandatory health insurance.
That is a serious lie.
This will ruin Romney if he signs it. He should realize that.
What would the options be if you got hit with a huge cost early on and didn't have the money in the account? Say an emergency surgery where the bills ran into the five figures or even pregnancy with complications?
That was a worry when we first switched too. Fortunately, we did not have to cross that bridge.
The medical account doesn't even honor ER visits until 30 days after the program starts.
So what? Do you really think the Religious Right was going to allow a Mormon to be President? Get real. They would rather settle for Hillary who is reportedly Methodist like Bush.
For all of you are upset that Romney isnt going to veto the bill, what good would that do? Did you see the numbers by which the bill passed in both House and Senate. Only two "no" votes in the entire House and Senate combined. Sounds like he's just giving the good citizens of Massachuesetts what they are stupid enough to want.
Forget him but what did you expect from Mass.
Not a Mormon whose idea of a good judicial appointment is a liberal gay Democrat who's a leader in the fight for gay marriage.
That's who Mitt Romney appointed in Massachusetts.
What you say makes sense to me. I can't imagine why anyone except all the Kennedy-Kerry-Frank supporters would remain in Massachusetts. Maybe that's the MA legislature's secret plan, to increase the welfare population of the state, so they can send more socialist lunatic representatives to Congress?
yes a fine breed of RINO, he is.
He fits well with that MASS-OF-2-SH*TS, Kerry and Kennedy.
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