Following Massachusetts' Lead on Health Insurance Coverage?
Welcome to this installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. This week we will only look at one article rather than several, mostly because it was the most interesting article I found compared to all the others. Entitled, Should All America Follow Massachusetts On Health Care?", this article from CQPolitics looks at the controversial, yet successful "Massachusetts Plan" and sees if it's viable for the rest of the nation as a whole.
For three years now, health insurance has been mandatory in the state, and as of the article's writing, ninety-seven percent of people in the state have health insurance coverage. This is pretty damned impressive, as it's the state with the highest level of insurance coverage in the nation. The article looks at how the law came to be, what problems its faces -- primarily cost -- and gaining support from businesses, insurance companies and so on.
Massachusetts is an anomaly of sorts in this regard. Even before the law took place, they had an unusually high level of coverage amongst its residents and a high level of wealth in the state. Also, proponents of the law took the time to bring many major players over to their side, such as insurance companies, unions, and businesses. This made the law easier to pass than it might've been elsewhere.
Currently, while the plan is fairly successful, it's also fairly expensive, and lawmakers are scrambling to find ways to cut costs during this economic downturn, and while Massachusetts had benefits such as wealth, the problem is that Massachusetts is merely one state. Adapting this plan to all fifty states with a nationwide insurance marketplace will be difficult and take time, but many think it can be done.
The final ingredient to Massachusetts' success -- and one that will again be hard to replicate nationally -- is the "stakeholder support" that Massachusetts lawmakers were able to arrange with businesses and insurance companies. Many of these are currently dead-set against a national health care plan, so they would need to be brought on board before a health plan could be created on a national level.
Does all this mean that a national plan can't be created in Massachusetts' image? Not at all, it just gives us a clear picture as to the difficulties involved in creating and implementing such a plan. Only time and hard work will tell if, as a nation, we'll be able to achieve the success of one state, but hopefully the opportunity to try will come our way.
