Critical Mass(Care)

The Boston Globe defends the MassCare public insurance program, with an editorial saying the program has worked and worked well (emphasis mine:)

The facts - according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation - are quite different. Its report this spring put the cost to the state taxpayer at about $88 million a year, less than four-tenths of 1 percent of the state budget of $27 billion. Yes, the state recently had to cut benefits for legal immigrants, and safety-net hospital Boston Medical Center has sued for higher state aid. But that is because the recession has cut state revenues, not because universal healthcare is a boondoggle. The main reason costs to the state have been well within expectations? More than half of all the previously uninsured got coverage by buying into their employers’ plans, not by opting for one of the state-subsidized plans.

This should be exciting news for those fiscal conservatives, including both Republicans and “blue dog’’ Democrats, who claim to support the goal of universal coverage while despairing over its budget impact. But that’s not what you hear from the Massachusetts bashers. Trying to scare off the nation from helping the uninsured get coverage, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said recently, “You don’t have to look any further than the universal healthcare mess in Massachusetts to see disaster ahead.’’ New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on Monday accused President Obama of “pushing a health plan that looks a lot like the system currently hemorrhaging money in Massachusetts.’’

The Republican governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, has also gotten his licks in. Costs in Massachusetts, he wrote in the Washington Post Monday, “have been dramatically higher than expected.’’ Pawlenty’s purpose in attacking this state’s plan might be both to discredit a national plan and to score points against former governor Mitt Romney, one of the architects of what Massachusetts has accomplished. Romney, of course, is a possible rival of Pawlenty for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.

Whether out of ignorance or convenience, all three bashers have it wrong. Unlike the Big Dig, health reform came in on time and under budget. It will be proportionately more expensive nationally to provide coverage for the uninsured than it has been here simply because the state began the task with a much lower rate of uninsured, 7 percent, compared with the US rate of 17 percent. But a national plan that relies, as Massachusetts’ does, on both government-subsidized insurance and a mandate on employers to offer insurance or pay a penalty (in Massachusetts’ case, a very small penalty) should be able to cover nearly everyone without busting the budget.

Which is true. If the critics' accusations that a public plan will destroy private health care are true, then in Massachustetts, private health care insurers should be reeling and on the verge of leaving the state completely. They're not, they're coexisting because the plans are competitive, which is exactly what should be happening.

I think more attention should be paid to MassCare and how it is working. People aren't being euthanized, they're not being beaten in the streets by the health police, food intake is not being government mandated by a fascist army of bureaucrats, and they're not having to wait six weeks to see a doctor and dying in the waiting room. The scares are phony. What people have in Massachussetts is health care that works.