Opinion Pieces Address Massachusetts Health Insurance Law

Main Category: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance
Article Date: 04 May 2006 - 2:00 PDT


Several newspapers recently published opinion pieces on a law enacted last month by Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) that will require all uninsured state residents to purchase health insurance by July 1, 2007, and will require employers in the state with 11 or more employees to provide coverage for workers. Summaries appear below.

• Steve Jacob, Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Romney "probably will be pushing a national solution for universal coverage" in the event he seeks the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, "but he's likely to face the same political forces that helped derail Bill Clinton's healthcare initiative of the early 1990s," Jacob, publisher of a Star-Telegram division, writes in an opinion piece. "Expect this to be addressed -- and potentially solved -- in state capitals rather than in Washington," he adds (Jacob, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 4/28).
  
  
• Bruce Bodaken, Los Angeles Times: California "can learn from Massachusetts that things get done if people compromise" on health insurance legislation, and state lawmakers "would do well to embrace two critical elements of the Massachusetts plan," Blue Shield of California Chair, President and CEO Bodaken writes in a Times opinion piece. "First, Massachusetts mandated shared responsibility" for health insurance, and, second, "Massachusetts made coverage affordable," he writes, adding, "California has many more uninsured residents and a structural budget deficit, so solving this problem will be much tougher than it was in Massachusetts. But we must succeed" (Bodaken, Los Angeles Times, 4/29).
  
  
• Rick Carlson, Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "It is medicine that should be the focus" of health care reform, and, "if the Massachusetts model is replicated -- reforming only the ways money for care is raised and used -- it will doom us to many more years of spiraling costs and poor health," Carlson, a clinical professor of policy programs in the Department of Health Services in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington and an affiliate professor in the School of Public Pharmacy at the University, writes in a Post-Intelligencer editorial. He adds, "U.S. health care policy is always about the business, and not the outcomes, of health care, as if the delivery system was its product, rather than the medicine it delivered. This is a fatal flaw" (Carlson, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4/28).
  
  
• David Broder, Washington Post: "It remains to be seen how many uninsured people actually order policies" under the Massachusetts law, "what the sign-up difficulties may be, how high the deductibles and copays have to be set to keep the price to $200 and whether there are sufficient economies and cost controls to make it affordable in the future," columnist Broder writes in a Post opinion piece. However, the law "provides the country with an important opportunity to test one possible solution to a vexing problem," he concludes (Broder, Washington Post, 4/30).

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