In poll, Mass. voters pan health reform

Only 26 percent of likely voters in Massachusetts believe health care reform has been a success and just 21 percent believe reform has made health care more affordable, according to newly released poll results.

The Rasmussen Reports poll of 500 likely Massachusetts voters, taken in April, also found only 10 percent said the quality of health care is getting better under the reform law rules here.

Most of those polled on April 16, 2009 said they weren’t sure whether reform was a success or failure (37 percent), that there’s been no change in health care affordability under reform (44 percent) and that health care quality is about the same (53 percent).

The poll was taken before talks stirred in Washington about a national health care reform push and before a wave of news in Massachusetts about difficulty affording the coverage expansions authorized under the 2006 reform law.

Massachusetts Health Care Reform Not as Successful as Lawmakers Claim, Free Market Analyst Says
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
By Marie Magleby

(CNSNews.com) - Lawmakers are painting a rose-colored picture of Massachusetts’ 2006 health care reform, according to Michael Tanner, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of the book, “Health Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It.”

Although Massachusetts’ health care system is often cited as a model for national reform, Tanner said the data show that lawmakers and some media are skewing the facts to downplay the reality of health care in the Bay State.

“It does not look like the Massachusetts plan has actually been successful at accomplishing what it set out to accomplish according to its proponents, if you want to judge it by their criteria,” Tanner said at a panel discussion on Monday at the U.S. Capitol.

“I think that that’s particularly relevant, since Massachusetts is so frequently cited by both folks on the left and on the right as a model for how health care reform nationally should go,” he said.

Congressional lawmakers, he added, should be wary of using the Massachusetts model if they want to avoid some of the same mistakes.

“You look to what they’re talking about here in Washington and then you look back to Massachusetts and you see some parallels,” said Tanner. “So the question then is, ‘What have we learned in those three years in Massachusetts?’”

When Massachusetts adopted a new health care plan three years ago, then-Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, claimed the plan would provide universal health care and lower insurance premiums, neither of which have been realized, according to Tanner.

“Massachusetts’s biggest mistake was they made universal coverage the lodestone of their reform,” he said.

Tanner further explained that while the rate of uninsured citizens in Massachusetts has decreased, the official statistic of 2.6 percent may be inaccurate.

“There’s reasons to doubt those statistics,” he said. “They are in large part based on a telephone survey of people in the state, and there’s a lot of reasons to be skeptical of telephone surveys, particularly when it comes to insurance.”

According to Tanner, a U.S. Census Bureau survey conducted in 2006 found that 5.4 percent of the population was still uninsured. State income-tax returns also suggest that the figure is more than five percent.

Similarly, Romney said the reform would make health care affordable for every Massachusetts citizen. According to Tanner, however, the situation has not turned out that way.

“The reality is that in 2007, the first year after the plan went into place, insurance premiums rose by 7.4 percent. It went up by about 12 percent in 2008, and they’re expected to rise nine percent this year,” he said. “Overall, that’s an average of 10 to12 percent increases in the insurance premiums in Massachusetts.”

“That’s compared to a 6 to 7 percent increase nationally over the same period,” he said.

Although Massachusetts health care reform has fallen short of these goals, its cost to taxpayers has increased, according to Tanner.

“Despite the fact that taxes increased and tax increases there are contemplated for the future, they still find the plan under-funded going forward,” he said. “That is an enormous burden on the taxpayers of Massachusetts.”

“That might, or might not, be forgivable if it had accomplished any of its original goals,” he said. “But it does not look like the Massachusetts plan has actually been successful at accomplishing what it set out to accomplish.”

Tanner said it is important to look more closely at health care reform in Massachusetts to address the issue on the national level.

“We started with a program that increased subsidies and limited choice. That led to growing costs, [and] that led to tax on expenditures, [and] that led to waiting times – the whole range that led right down the road to national health care,” he said.

Three years ago, Tanner wrote that the Massachusetts reform would result “in a slow but steady spiral downward toward a government-run health care system,” he said. “Three years in, I think that that is proving true and we are in the middle of that spiral downward toward a government-run health care plan this past week.”

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=49933

Romney: Much of Massachusetts’ Mandatory Health Care Plan Could be Applied Nationwide
Monday, June 01, 2009
By Nicholas Ballasy, Video Reporter

(CNSNews.com) – Former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney told CNSNews.com that much of the health care plan he implemented in the Bay State in 2006—which mandates that all citizens have health insurance—could be replicated on a national scale, although he prefers that each state have flexibility in developing their programs.

Critics of the program in Massachusetts have noted recently that, in some ways, it has not lived up to expectations, with spiraling costs, fines levied against people who do not join, and proposals to limit coverage and cap spending to control costs.

When asked whether the Massachusetts plan could be replicated by the Obama administration nationwide, Romney told CNSNews.com: “I think a lot of what we did could be applicable on a national basis. My preference, however, is not to have a one-size-fits-all plan pushed on all the states, but instead to give the states flexibility in creating th

“Our health care plan in Massachusetts was tailored for our state specifically and I believe a lot of what it did would be a much better model than what he’s [President Obama] considering right now,” said Romney.

“Our plan did not include a government insurance plan,” he said. “We did not put together a government-insurance product that was then sold to individuals. Instead, we relied entirely on private market-based insurance plans to help people get insurance. I think that’s a much better model.

In its National Health Preview section of Mar. 27, The Wall Street Journal editorialized that the Romney plan as it has evolved in Massachusetts is what the Obama administration and leading Democrats want to implement nationally.

In Massachusetts, noted The Journal, the program “is budgeted at $880 million for 2010, a 7.3% single-year increase” and the “state’s overall costs on health programs have increased 42% (!) since 2006.”

In addition, the lawmakers there “have already hiked the fines for people who don’t obtain insurance under the ‘individual mandate,’” and have “increased business penalties, taxed insurers and hospitals, raised premiums, and pumped up the state tobacco lobby. That’s still not enough money.”

Massachusetts apparently does not have the money to cover everyone and is looking for ways to control costs. According to a state commission set up Gov. Deval Patrick, these would include an option to “exclude coverage of services of low priority/low value,” and another option that would put “a limitation on the total amount of money available for health care services.”

Former Gov. Romney told CNSNews.com that he is pleased with much of the program he implemented, but he also said the legislature added things that he does not support.

“I am happy with the fact that some 440,000 people who were previously uninsured are now insured,” said Romney. “I’m happy with the fact that the plan has changed the lives of a lot of people.”

“There’s a couple aspects that I think should be adjusted,” he said. “One is, we have indicated in the legislation that funding to hospitals for giving out free care would be terminated in order to pay for the system—that has not been done yet. As a result, it’s costing more than it should because that money was supposed to be brought out of the hospitals and given to people to help them buy their insurance.”

“And there’s some other things I wouldn’t have done that the legislature put in there—they have, for instance mandates, in terms of mandated coverages, in the insurance itself, which I would have allowed the private market to develop on its own rather than be mandated,” said Romney.

According to The Journal, “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. … The real lesson of Massachusetts is that reform proponents won’t tell Americans the truth about what ‘universal’ coverage really means: Runaway costs followed by price controls and bureaucratic rationing.”

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/Content/Article.aspx?rsrcid=48842

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