As a state, we have committed to reform our health care system, maximizing access to coverage for people who have none. This effort requires participation at all levels, including people who historically have thought health coverage was either not possible or not necessary. These people, who MUST participate for this initiative to have a chance, are just beginning to pay attention. To, draw them in, we must reach out to educate and assist them where they work and live.
We would like to think of health care reform as a blanket that covers most of us; but so far it’s a quilt with some squares firmly stitched and others barely tacked on. Of the 63,000 formerly uninsured people now covered (as of April) by Commonwealth Care, 53,000 pay no premiums, and most of them were moved from Free Care into Commonwealth Care through a computer data transfer. Others enrolled in MassHealth after last summer’s expansion. These are the starter quilt pieces, sewn in first to begin the pattern.
But we all know that for real success, we need to strengthen the connection to the other quilt pieces – the rest of the uninsured. They include moderate-income people who are not used to engaging state systems, people who can afford to pay something for health insurance but not as much as is being asked, and young people who don’t think they need insurance. A true measure of success would be the number of these people we’ve educated and enrolled. So far (April) only 2,191 people pay significant premiums for Commonwealth Care. By this measure, we still have a long way to go.
As many of the uninsured come to understand what the individual mandate means to them, they will look for help. Before they call a toll-free number, they will ask someone they trust. We know that many people prefer to look for help close to home – often to community organizations and trusted advisors. It is these people who make sure the stitches hold.
Full funding of outreach and enrollment assistance in local communities is essential to the integrity of the quilt. It demonstrates our state’s commitment to the real success of health care reform.
Michael DeChiara, Anne Rosen & Meg Kroeplin
Community Partners
The poetry in this is that the more Massachusetts metamorphoses over the years into this ungainly, inbred, massively overpaid and underproductive state ogre–now inbreeding even with local health corporations–the only bite left is DOR.
But the Connector’s DOR pinch won’t help the state when revenue drops off a cliff in the next several years, as layoffs escalate with a withering national finance picture, as mortgage origination bankruptcies snowball, more people lose their properties in foreclosures, out-migration picks up, and more storefronts close. The money will have just evaporated: with the result that financial jobs will also be cut en-masse, further exacerbating the realities of the state economy’s stagnation and decline (recession). And this poverty will drive even more into Commonwealth Care, a construct that is–not figuratively, but literally–this state’s gift to corporations.
But back to the poetry: The more hundreds of thousands of dollars this state pays its employees (and there are thousands of them that this state compensates in this way), the less work seems to get done by many of them, and the further removed they seem to be from both their job definitions and their constituencies. So comparatively little work will get contributed by them. So you can presume they’ll be of little help in this endeavor.
Still it is a wonder that the businesses and individuals that are expected to just Hand-It-Over in increasingly greater amounts, will for much longer put up with the kinds of extravagances and opulence that are only most recently represented by the 498,000,000 dollar ten-story addition just announced at one local hospital.
By comparison, $300,000,000 will build a 50-story luxury condominium tower. That’s almost $200,000,000 less than what’s just been announced. And that’s only one (1) Boston location. (Other health care groups have made other multi-million dollar announcements elsewhere in the city.) Then you have to staff it, light it, heat and cool it, and maintain it.
Now to pay for the opulence, they want money from you. They’ll try to get it from your employer as well. (If that succeeds, the employers have much higher costs to foist onto a hoped-for consumer that is economically underwater. More layoffs follow.)
And you can bet the health empire building plan announcements have just started; the building never stops. (While the state is reported to lose population.) It is endorsed by a state populace that inhales its own health marketing propaganda.
And you’ll check your pockets and your bank accounts to pay for it, and there will be nothing there.