Healthcare overhaul could add financial burdens to state (Massachusetts)

Boston Globe ^ | May 19, 2009 | Lisa Wangsness

[reaganaut1]

The Senate committee in charge of financing the upcoming healthcare overhaul is considering changes that could place new financial burdens on Massachusetts institutions and employees, including limiting the tax exclusion for employer-provided health coverage, a major benefit to employees in states like Massachusetts, where insurance is expensive and plans tend to be generous.

...

The policy options would either tinker with Medicare payments in hopes of wringing waste and inefficiency out of the system, or would limit healthcare-related tax benefits, such as health savings accounts.

The document also proposed new tax rules that could affect major Massachusetts institutions, including requiring nonprofit hospitals - Boston has some of the nation's best-known - to meet minimal charitable obligations to keep their tax-exempt status, and reducing or eliminating major tax deductions for nonprofit Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.

...

But if Democrats tighten and standardize the insurance regulations so all insurers would have to accept everyone and could not discriminate against the sick, "why give these guys a special tax break for being the insurer of last resort?" he said.

...

The most dramatic plan - and the one that could yield an enormous amount of money - is taxing some portion of healthcare benefits employees and their employers now purchase tax-free through work. Critics of the current system say the benefit goes disproportionately to the wealthiest employees and encourages overuse of healthcare services, since those with the most expensive and generous insurance plans get the most benefit.

Because Massachusetts residents typically earn more money and have better insurance than most Americans, limitations on that tax exclusion could disproportionately hurt them. Workers at companies with older employees, whose insurance is therefore more expensive, could also be at a disadvantage.

[reaganaut1]

This could not happen to a more deserving group of people, overall, and I say that as an MA resident.

[ClearCase_guy]

those with the most expensive and generous insurance plans get the most benefit.

Imagine that.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Free stuff is rexpensive.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

rexpensive = expensive

[Tennessee Nana]

Healthcare overhaul in MASS ???

Why ???

Romney left it in perfect order...

Do I have to put a /s ???

[Wiseghy]

Watch as union health plans are excluded from this tax, however. The union plans are the worst offenders in offering benefits that are unneeded and unnecessary. The odd thing is that even union members seem to know this, but leaders seem to be unable to effectively bargain for givebacks on health benies, and much money is wasted on perfectly healthy employees.

[rhombus]

rexpensive = expensive

how about rexpensive=really, really expensive?

[RC2]

They can’t even pay for Medicare, how they going to pay for this one? OH....I forgot.....raise taxes to the point that you will need to send all your wages to the feds.

[ClearCase_guy]

MA is an amazing place. It's mandatory to have health insurance here -- if you choose to go without, you pay a tax penalty. Now the state is finding that mandatory health coverage is exzpensive -- so they will impose a tax penalty on the people who have health insurance.

Whatever the problem is, the solution is pretty clear: Tax it!

[Doctor Raoul]

Rut Roh....

[lesko]

Count me as one that has absolutely no sympathy for the people of Massachusetts. They continuously vote for liberal Democrats and defend clowns like Kennedy and Kerry. They deserve this and more...

[3catsanadog]

Why do they need an overhaul? I thought the healthcare plan they passed a few years ago was the shining light that all of the states and the country should aspire to.

[Diogenesis]

Election2008 Spoiler Mitt Romney chortles,
as he inflicts his socialized medicine (HillaryCARE=ROmneyCARE)
upon the Massachusetts citizens without any of their votes.

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"Hospital patients 'left in agony'"
"Patients were allegedly left screaming in pain and drinking from flower vases on a nightmare hospital ward.
Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust over three years, a damning Healthcare Commission report said.
The watchdog's investigation found inadequately trained staff who were too few in number, junior doctors left alone in charge at night and patients left without food, drink or medication as their operations were repeatedly cancelled.
Patients were left in pain or forced to sit in soiled bedding for hours at a time and were not given their regular medication, the Commission heard.
Receptionists with no medical training were expected to assess patients coming in to A&E, some of whom needed urgent care.
Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS, said there had been a "gross and terrible breach" of patients' trust and a "complete failure of leadership".
The Healthcare Commission's chairman Sir Ian Kennedy said the investigation followed concerns about a higher than normal death rate at the Trust, which senior managers could not explain.
He said: "The resulting report is a shocking story. Our report tells a story of appalling standards of care and chaotic systems for looking after patients. These are words I have not previously used in any report.
"There were inadequacies in almost every stage of caring for patients. There was no doubt that patients will have suffered and some of them will have died as a result."
Julie Bailey, 47, was so concerned about the care being given to her 86-year-old mother Bella at Stafford Hospital that she and her relatives slept in a chair at her bedside for eight weeks.
She said: "We saw patients drinking out of..."

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"Paramedics told: 'Let accident victims die if they want to' in new row over patient rights (UK)"
Health Service paramedics have been told not to resuscitate terminally-ill patients who register on a controversial new database to say they want to die.
It has been set up by the ambulance service in London for hundreds of people who have only a few months to live so that they may register their 'death wishes' in advance.
It is believed to be the first in the country, but other trusts around the country are expected to follow suit to comply with Government guidelines which state that patients' wishes should be taken into account, even at the point of death.
Patients' groups and doctors have welcomed the scheme, but it has met opposition from pro-life groups who say it violates the sanctity of life.
The system would come into play if a cancer patient, for example, was in serious pain and rang 999 for help to alleviate the suffering.
But if the paramedics arrived and the patient was close to death, he or she would not be resuscitated if such a request was registered on the database.
This would also be the case if a patient on the database was being transferred between hospitals, and had a heart attack.
Dominica Roberts from the Pro-Life Alliance said: 'This is very sad and very dangerous. It's another step along the slippery slope, at the bottom of which is euthanasia as we see in Holland. 'Paramedics should be there to save lives. They should not be there to let patients die. The medical profession should not agree with someone's belief that their life is worthless.'"

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"National Health Preview - The Massachusetts debacle, coming soon to your neighborhood."
"Three years ago, the former Massachusetts Governor had the inadvertent good sense to create the "universal" health-care program that the White House and Congress now want to inflict on the entire country.
It is proving to be instructive, as Mr. Romney's foresight previews what President Obama, Max Baucus, Ted Kennedy and Pete Stark are cooking up for everyone else.
In Massachusetts's latest crisis, Governor Deval Patrick and his Democratic colleagues are starting to move down the path that government health plans always follow when spending collides with reality -- i.e., price controls.
As costs continue to rise, the inevitable results are coverage restrictions and waiting periods. It was only a matter of time.

They're trying to manage the huge costs of the subsidized middle-class insurance program that is gradually swallowing the state budget.
The program provides low- or no-cost coverage to about 165,000 residents, or three-fifths of the newly insured, and is budgeted at $880 million for 2010, a 7.3% single-year increase that is likely to be optimistic.
The state's overall costs on health programs have increased by 42% (!) since 2006.

What really whipped along RomneyCare were claims that health care would be less expensive if everyone were covered.
But reducing costs while increasing access are irreconcilable issues.
Mr. Romney should have known better before signing on to this not-so-grand experiment, especially since the state's "free market" reforms that he boasts about have proven to be irrelevant when not fictional.
Only 21,000 people have used the "connector" that was supposed to link individuals to private insurers."

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A Very Sick Health Plan; Bay State’s ‘Grand Experiment’ Fails [RomneyCare]
"The Daily News Record, Harrisonburg, Va. - 2009-03-31 "
"For folks increasingly leery of President Obama’s plan to radically overhaul America’s health-care system,
or 17 percent of the nation’s economy, all this could hardly have come at a better time —
that is, fiscal troubles aplenty within Repubican Mitt Romney’s brainchild, Massachusetts’ “grand experiment” in “universal” health care."

"Initiated on Mr. Romney’s gubernatorial watch in 2006, this “experiment” has fallen on hard times, and predictably so.
Even though the Bay State commenced its program with a far smaller percentage of uninsured residents than exists nationwide,
“RomneyCare” is threatening to bankrupt the state. Budgeted for Fiscal Year 2010 at $880 million,
or 7.3 percent more than a year ago, this plan, aimed at providing low- or no-cost health coverage to roughly 165,000 residents,
has caused Massachusetts’ overall expenditures on all health-related programs to jump an astounding 42 percent since 2006.

So what does Mr. Romney’s successor, Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick, propose as a remedy for these skyrocketing costs?
Well, whaddya think? The standard litany of prescriptions (no pun intended) — price controls and spending caps, for a start, and then, again predictably, waiting periods and limitations on coverage.
As in Europe and Canada, so too in Massachusetts. And, we feel certain, everyone from Mr. Romney to Mr. Patrick said, “It would never happen here.”
But then, such things are inevitable when best-laid plans, with all their monstrous costs, run smack-dab into fiscal reality.

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"Dem Congresswoman Admits Obama Health Care Plan Will Destroy Private Health Insurance Industry"

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Thousands of patients with terminal cancer were dealt a blow last night after a decision was made to deny them life prolonging drugs.
The Government's rationing body said two drugs for advanced breast cancer and a rare form of stomach cancer were too expensive for the NHS.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is expected to confirm guidance in the next few weeks that will effectively ban their use.
The move comes despite a pledge by Nice to be more flexible in giving life-extending drugs
to terminally-ill cancer patients after a public outcry last year over 'death sentence' decisions."

[Dick Bachert]

Gee, I wonder if healthcare costs and the increasing difficulty native-born TAXPAYERS are having even FINDING affordable medical care could be solved if our alleged “leaders” would get the illegals/welfare leech problems under control?

My niece is an OB/GYN who took her pre-med at HAAAAVVAAAAADDD! Needless to say, she emerged from that experience a FLAMING, BLEEDING HEART LIBERAL. (She stopped catching babies and went into research when her malpractice premiums exceeded her annual earnings.)

Upon completing her medical training at yet another liberal university, she interned at a hospital near the border in San Diego.

It was there that a mystical transformation took place: She began to connect the heavy deductions from the slave wage GROSS EARNINGS for which she busted her butt for as many as 72 virtually sleepless hours in a row with the taxis and jalopies regularly sliding to the curb in front of the ER.

Many of them contained pregnant illegals who won the race to deliver their babies HERE. She caught many of those “anchor babies” who, under the current — and ERRONEOUS — interpretation of the 14th Amendment were IMMEDIATELY NEW AMERICANS. The mother – who, obviously, could not care for the child if she were back in her native land — could not be deported now even if the INS and the political bosses WANTED her deported . And as the mother of a new US citizen, the woman could remain here for about as long as she cared to – and that was usually for life.

Most of those patients were welfare recipients and the deliveries were charity cases: The bill for the hospital’s – and HER services – were routinely spread over the bills of those who DO pay. And what the other users of those facilities don’t cover went back to the taxpayers.
And since my niece was now a taxpayer, they were costing HER.

And while she may not exactly be a libertarian, today she’s now a LOOONNNNG way from Haaaavaaaaaad.

And just so the bleeders who might see this don’t think me some sort of ethnocentric bigot, I submit this problem is MORE than just about illegals.

Before my oldest daughter was born at University Hospital in Cleveland in 1967, I sat in the main lobby as welfare mother-to-be after welfare mother-to-be shuffled through the door to the maternity ER for THEIR free deliveries.

Before WE could take OUR daughter home, I had to cough up over 3 grand. And that was a great deal of dough in 1967, especially for a guy just out of the USAF.

As I wrote the check, I remembered the magazine article I’d recently read by a hospital administrator from Massachusetts who admitted that all US hospitals practiced a form of medical Marxism, spreading the costs of care for indigents over the bills of those who DO pay for care. Given the move to socialism here, it probably will never be otherwise: Not counting Byzantine complexity and confusion, government produces – and has — NOTHING unless it first takes it from some PERSON. SOMEBODY ALWAYS PAYS.

The illegals have been using the emergency rooms of our hospitals for their health-care, almost always at no charge to them. That cost is either spread over other users or the taxpayers. We have seen a national epidemic of hospital closings due to their insolvency, much of it caused by the burden of trying to render care to PEOPLE WHO SHOULDN’T EVEN BE HERE, denying care to native-born citizens who normally pay their bills and their taxes.

Look, I have a big enough problem paying for the 3rd and 4th generation slackers and welfare bums who were BORN here.

It’s time we stopped paying for those who were not.

[ejonesie22]

The irony...

[socialismisinsidious]

Socialized Medicine aka Universal Health Care PING LIST

FReepmail me if you want to be added to or removed from this ping list.

[Leisler]

Where are all the Rombotts defending Mr. Conservative?

[ejonesie22]

Must be having a group training class in prep for phase of of his 2012 run...

They have been a little scarce lately, must have revised the curriculum for FR after the boss threw down the gauntlet..