Opinion Pieces Address Health Insurance In Massachusetts

Main Category: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance
Article Date: 17 Jan 2006 - 0:00 PDT

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Four recently published opinion pieces examined health insurance and the various reform proposals being considered in Massachusetts. Summaries appear below.

• Charles Baker/Thomas Lee, Boston Business Journal: To "sustain" the improvements the state hopes to make by expanding health coverage to the uninsured, it "will require a health care system that is more effective and efficient than it has been in the past," Charles Baker, CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and Thomas Lee, network president of Partners Healthcare System, write in a Business Journal opinion piece. Baker and Lee review points they contributed to a report by the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, noting that there should be an investment in meaningful cost and quality measures; consumer-directed health plans that fully cover preventive care and medications for chronic conditions; fair payment rates for MassHealth, the state's Medicaid program, and the uncompensated-care pool; pay-for-performance efforts focused on defined quality goals; and a system to reward employees who select efficient health plans (Baker/Lee, Boston Business Journal, 1/6).
  
  
• Steve Bailey, Boston Globe: A white paper written by former state Health and Human Services Secretary Ron Preston for Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) in May 2004 would "make good bedtime reading for legislators now at loggerheads over health care reform," Bailey writes in a Globe opinion piece. The paper includes "many of the themes that are central" to Romney's current plan, such as a mandate that all people in Massachusetts have health insurance and the creation of low-cost individual policies. Bailey notes that Romney and Preston ultimately disagreed on the need for new funding and on a mandate that employers contribute to the cost of the plan. Bailey adds that Preston in the white paper wrote, "Everyone must pay some or give some, and most must do both. If we all do our parts, we can do this task. We will see everyone insured, and we will thereby lay a foundation for a better Commonwealth and a better health care for all." Bailey concludes, "It is a sound premise" (Bailey, Boston Globe, 1/11).
  
  
• Michael Dukakis, Boston Globe: The business community in Massachusetts is "one of our biggest assets," but "the state's health care system is anti-business," Michael Dukakis, former Massachusetts governor and a Northeastern University professor, writes in a Globe opinion piece. According to Dukakis, the current Massachusetts health care system puts a burden on the state's businesses because small businesses are being forced to "not only pay for [their] own employees," but also for the employees of larger companies that do not provide insurance. He says that taxpayers also are "paying hundreds of millions of dollars under the Medicaid program to insure the families of working people whose employers don't cover them." Dukakis concludes, "[T]he business community has to get serious about a long-term plan that stops putting the burden on small- and medium-sized businesses while some of the biggest employers in the state get off scot-free" (Dukakis, Boston Globe, 1/10).
  
  
• Michael Widmer, Boston Globe: "While there is an element of truth" to the idea that everyone should do their own part to advance the goal of significant health care reform, "the proposed payroll tax" on employers who do not provide health insurance to workers "would have the opposite effect," Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, writes in a Globe opinion piece. According to Widmer, the "proposal has flaws that would undermine the goal of expanding access to the uninsured" including that it would raise "no new revenues" for health care reform and would "create perverse financial incentives" for some employers to drop their coverage because the tax could cost less than providing health coverage. The payroll tax would "raise the total costs of providing universal coverage compared with ... [an] individual mandate without the payroll tax" and would put an "added burden on the Massachusetts economy at a time when the state's job growth is badly trailing the nation," he says (Widmer, Boston Globe, 1/5).

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