Readers of the New York Times picked up their Tuesday paper to read that at least three governors are struggling with the clash between their desire to cover their uninsured citizens and the ever rising cost of health care. Pennsylvania’s Ed Rendell is learning, as the article says – “that to contain costs is eventually to pluck dollars from someone’s pocket. His plan has incited protest from hospitals, doctors, insurers and small businesses, each of them finding something to detest”. Governor Schwarzenegger, the author notes, says that making insurance mandatory will have to include “stringent reductions in health care spending”. But before we in Massachusetts can assert that we have solved the problems that our fellow states have failed to solve, a word of caution is perhaps in order. We are an expensive medical community to begin with, and we are far from immune from the cost pressures that affect every community. Our groundbreaking health reform rests on responsibility shared by taxpayers, individual citizens, and business owners large and small. But the shared responsibility has to include providers as well, if health care is to be affordable over time. The Quality and Cost Council is just beginning to address these issues, first by getting cost information to the public. My own agency, the GIC, is measuring cost effectiveness of specialists. There are other efforts by the federal government and others to focus on cost as well as quality and access. But if Massachusetts is to keep on leading the pack, we’re going to have to keep our eye on the cost issue and be willing to do what it takes to put on the brakes. Slowing down may be the only way to get to where we’re going.
Dolores L. Mitchell, Executive Director of the Group Insurance Commission of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the agency that provides life, health, disability and dental and vision services to over 285,000 State employees, retirees and their dependents.
Massachusetts is “leading the pack”? At what, picking the meat off the dead carcass?
If Massachusetts is an example to all, it is just in that the Insurance companies duped a spineless Democratic Party legislature and an ambitious Republican governor into this corrupt plan.
The insurance companies targeted Massachusetts because we are a liberal state, with a legislature easily manipulated by false promises. And most importantly we started off with more people having health insurance than most other states. About 10% were uninsured as of the 2000 census, making us one of the states where the uninsured would have the least amount of political power to say no.
Well put, Pat.
I agree with pat. I also want full diclosure on how the so called lawmakers in a free world could dupe its’ own citizens. There seems to me that some thing stinks about all of. and the smell is coming from the state house.
Kudos, Pat! And also congrats to Delores Mitchell for allowing First Amendment rights of expression on her pages!! This fact should not go unnoticed or unappreciated; check out the “Let’s Talk Healthcare” pages hosted by Charlie Baker, CEO of Harvard Pilgrim. Should you post any insurance dissent there, you can bet it won’t see the light of day. So let’s take this chance to thank Md. Mitchell for letting us speak candidly about this outrageous, exceedingly cocksure “health” insurance industry powergrab embodied in Chapter 58.
I took the initiative of downloading the impossibly-worded Chapter 58 in its entirety from Mass.govhttp://www.mass.gov/legis/laws/seslaw06/sl060058.htm.
Needless to say, it is predictably and totally unreadable. But should that come as any stunned surprise? Somebody up there is BANKING on none of us understanding it. All that undecipher-ability means lots of nooks and crannies in which to stuff hidden perks for a greedy industry bent on, as Marcia Angell succinctly points out “squeezing blood from a turnip”.
And as our insurance Police State rolls into place in its Beacon Hill Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicles, ready to pounce on the working populace, we wonder out loud just how far this thing will go. “Not so fast, Bucky”, one of my hard-working mentors urges. “Force people to buy pi– poor products and there’s bound to be a backlash.”
Those up in that ivory tower on Beacon Hill – or those twin edifices of arrogance, the John Hancock and Prudential towers – will be facing a reality check, hopefully before 2009.
D