I attended a presentation by Jon Kingsdale in early August at which he stated that there were 175,000 newly insured in MA as of July 1; 105,000 in Commonwealth Care and 70,000 in Commonwealth Choice. I asked him how many of the 105,000 were paying customers. Response: 20 percent. That leaves 80 percent paying nothing. Since then, I have found out that all 80 percent are not NEWLY insured; some were auto-enrolled from other programs.

According to figures from the MA Budget & Policy Center, on August 28, 2007, the Census Bureau estimated that 653,000 person in MA were without health insurance during the 2004-2006 period which is 10.3 percent of the population.

Whether one goes by these numbers or those in your letter, the Connector is not exceeding their expectations for this sham reform as they like to tell the public in their victory propaganda.

To Chip Joffe-Hapern:

Congratulations on the fine work you have done insuring previously uninsured people. However, the majority of MA residents who are uninsured will be badly hurt by this law. The premiums are not affordable and the coverage is inadequate, nevermind adding in the copays.

Furthermore, it is a crime to steal our hard-earned money in the form of penalties to subsidize the plans because we need that money to pay our heat and utility bills, real estate taxes, food, etc.

You refer to this as shared responsibility but who is doing the sharing? The low-to-middle income residents who can least afford it plus we are subsidizing through our taxes per usual. It’s a double whammy and cui bono?. Your fifteen seconds are up. Not us.

The subsidized plans also contain an estate recovery program and our confidential medical records are to be handed over to the Connector, a group of appointed bureaucrats with no checks and balances.

Massachusetts should be ashamed. It is time the rest of the ctiizens of this great nation understand what is truly going on here.

William Shakespeare wrote: “The evil men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

I am glad that you were able to provide insurance to your clients. My concerns are:
a.) Will they be able to maintain that insurance?

b.) Will they be able to obtain care under that insurance?

Social work is a noble calling, and it is not particularly profitable in the monetary sense. I laud the fact that you may have done some good. However, what you and the current members of the Connector Board need to acknowledge, is that many thousands of people will be hurt by this ill-considered and punitive law. People like Norma, and to a lesser degree, myself. You might argue that waivers are available to those who can not afford insurance, but these are issued at the whim of the Connector, and in the realest possible sense, they accomplish nothing. Are you saying that we can do no better than this?

While we should not lose sight of the larger goal of achieving universal and comprehensive health coverage, I suggest that we not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I can’t tell these previously uninsured individuals that we are going to deny them health coverage, because we have not yet found the supposedly-perfect health care delivery system yet.

In regard to Mr. Norton’s last comment, I was a member of the Connector Board of Directors from May 2006 to August 2007. For the record, I am a social worker, not an “executive in a newly fattened insurance industry”. Since my term expired, I have not been offered a “lucrative lobbyist job” and I don’t expect that will happen. I can only dream!

Thanks for continuing to point out how wasteful and ineffective this bogus “reform” actually is. I’m certain that when their terms on the board expire all of the Connector members will either return to executive positions in a newly fattened insurance industry or move on to lucrative lobbyist jobs. In the meantime, the middle class continues to struggle and vanish.