About Massachusetts Mandatory Health Insurance
There is currently a proposal to make health insurance coverage mandatory at the Federal level. People would be wise to look up everything that has been written about the Massachusetts plan before endorsing such a proposal.
Single-payer means just that! It does not mean forcing yet more people to buy into the insurance companies' schemes to make money.
It is my opinion that we would be well advised to investigate these proposals thoroughly before we endorse the health care plan that is currently on the table, then to write our Congressmen, Senators, the Secretary of HEW, and the President himself with our personal views on the matter. Let the people be heard, and if the people like the plan, then I will say no more.
Here's a link, followed by a reader comment in today's New York Times:
http://www.heartland.org...
"The mandate approach isn’t going so well in Massachusetts... In fact, if the demands for “evidence-based medicine” were applied equally to public policy, policymakers would run away from the idea of mandatory coverage as fast as possible.
Republican governor Mitt Romney proclaimed that ‘every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance,’ that costs would be reduced through ‘market reforms’ encouraging ‘personal responsibility,’ and that the plan would require ‘no new taxes ... and no government takeover,’” wrote Dr. Paul Hsieh, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Medicine, in the Fall 2008 issue of the Objective Standard.
However, "two years after its inception, the Massachusetts plan has failed to achieve either of its goals. Instead,” wrote Hsieh, “the plan has increased costs for individuals and the state, reduced revenues for doctors and hospitals, and left Massachusetts officials in the awkward position of having to admit that their ‘universal coverage is not likely to be universal any time soon.’”
State costs have gone up so much that Massachusetts has decided to cut payments to physicians and hospitals, which has reduced access to medical services instead of improving it as promised.
The state is facing a shortage of doctors while being swamped with new patients forced to wait two to three months for appointments. In other words, Bay Staters may have health insurance coverage, but they don’t have health care.
Even the poor (who have been aided under other programs) are being hurt. The Cambridge Health Alliance, which has long provided care to the indigent, is cutting staff, reducing services, and limiting referrals to specialists in an effort to stay solvent in the face of rising costs and reduced payments."