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We have seen the future—and it is Massachusetts, and it doesn’t work.
“We continue to study Massachusetts’ health overhaul experiment as a harbinger of ObamaCare. And we continue to see serious problems ahead,” observes Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute in a must-read piece on the disaster in the Bay State.
Turner has done an excellent job of breaking down the many ways in which the Massachusetts system shows “the near impossibility of containing costs in a system where incentives go in exactly the opposite direction.”
“On average, health insurance now costs $14,723 for a family of four in Massachusetts, compared to $13,027 nationally. That’s nearly 12 percent higher than the national average. Reform has not made insurance more affordable,” Turner notes.
“[S]ome small Massachusetts employers are dropping health insurance and sending their workers into the taxpayer-funded health insurance pool. They say they have no choice because of relentlessly rising costs. This spells trouble for taxpayers.”
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IWV Director and MSNBC Political Analyst Michelle D. Bernard, joined Hardball to discuss Sarah Palin’s future plans in politics and Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele.
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Liberals will be excited by this. A report from the Center for American Progress by Ruy Teixeira claims voting trends suggest that America will long be dominated by fans of big government.
All of his ducks seem to be in a row… except for one thing. Teixeira stakes his entire claim on one huge assumption: People who voted for Obama will vote for Democrats indefinitely.
Obama is a Democrat, I will give him that. But voting for Obama does not lock a voter into the socialistic, big government focus of today’s Democratic Party. Especially not now, when Obama’s approval rating has lost so much ground with unaffiliated voters and females. (Remember, in 2008, he won a majority of voters who identified themselves as unaffiliated or moderate and a strong majority of the female vote.)
Check out the president’s job approval ratings so far this summer, courtesy of Rasmussen Reports:
May 26, 2010: Among men, 20% Strongly Approve and 50% Strongly Disapprove. Among women, those numbers are 27% and 40%.
June 4, 2010: Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats Strongly Approve while 70% of Republicans Strongly Disapprove. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 16% Strongly Approve and 46% Strongly Disapprove.
June 16, 2010: Forty-eight percent (48%) of Democrats Strongly Approve while 75% of Republicans Strongly Disapprove. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 12% Strongly Approve and 52% Strongly Disapprove.
About half of Democrats give the president the thumbs-up, but Republicans and unaffiliated voters strongly disapprove of his performance in more instances. Gallup also released a report Wednesday that said Obama’s approval rating is down from 56% last summer to 38% this summer among Independents. And now many more women strongly disapprove of Obama’s performance than strongly approve. So it’s clear that it’s possible to change one’s mind after an election. Regret is tough – but it shows hope for the right.
Furthermore, voter participation was abnormally high in 2008. Is that trend going to continue? Is Teixeira going to assume the same numbers at ballot boxes this November, and every election after that? Here’s a piece of demographic data: Latino Decisions, a polling firm, found that political interest in the Hispanic community is at an all-time low. And it might be Obama’s doing! Some blame the decline on a deep disappointment with the president’s unfulfilled promise to take up immigration reform.
While the president’s liberal policies (such as his unpopular health care reform) may be to blame for his low approval ratings, there may also be a reality check with voters as far as the economy. Either way, it’s hard to support someone who didn’t deliver on his promises. So for lovers of liberty, the Teixeira report shouldn’t be anything to worry about. Americans across many demographics are changing their minds about Obama and about the Democratic Party.
It’s not right to make the huge assumption that so many demographics that voted for Obama will continue to vote for Democrats. Yes they can, but no, they probably won’t.
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President Obama has hailed the Massachusetts healthcare plan as being “essentially identical” to the one Congress enacted, despite public protests, just 100 days ago.
So, here’s the bad news: the Massachusetts plan is a total disaster. Joseph Rago, an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, has a devastating critique of it in today’s newspaper. You might want to take an aspirin before you read it…
Rago notes:
As events are now unfolding, the Massachusetts plan couldn’t be a more damning indictment of ObamaCare. The state’s universal health-care prototype is growing more dysfunctional by the day, which is the inevitable result of a health system dominated by politics.
The problem addresses is that the program is simply financially unsustainable—insurance companies have higher costs because of the system, and the government has only one way to halt the rise in costs: caps. Caps, really, are a solution only in an imaginary world. They do not stop the cost to the companies from going up; they simply mandate the companies can’t charge an adequate amount to sustain them. That means that companies won’t remain solvent.
Rago reports:
Mr. [Robert] Dynan [a career insurance commissioner] added that “The current course . . . has the potential for catastrophic consequences including irreversible damage to our non-profit health care system” and that “there most likely will be a train wreck (or perhaps several train wrecks).”
Sure enough, the five major state insurers have so far collectively lost $116 million due to the rate cap. Three of them are now under administrative oversight because of concerns about their financial viability. Perhaps [Governor Deval] Patrick felt he could be so reckless because health-care demagoguery is the strategy for his fall re-election bid against a former insurance CEO.
Like the national plan, the Massachusetts plan was sold to the public (to the extent it was sold to the public at all) in a misleading way. Rago:
An entitlement sold as a way to reduce costs was bound to fundamentally change the system. The larger question—for Massachusetts, and now for the nation—is whether that was really the plan all along.
“If you’re going to do health-care cost containment, it has to be stealth,” said Jon Kingsdale, speaking at a conference sponsored by the New Republic magazine last October. “It has to be unsuspected by any of the key players to actually have an effect.” Mr. Kingsdale is the former director of the Massachusetts “connector,” the beta version of ObamaCare’s insurance “exchanges,” and is now widely expected to serve as an ObamaCare regulator.
He went on to explain that universal coverage was “fundamentally a political strategy question”—a way of finding a “significant systematic way of pushing back on the health-care system and saying, ‘No, you have to do with less.’ And that’s the challenge, how to do it. It’s like we’re waiting for a chain reaction but there’s no catalyst, there’s nothing to start it.”
In other words, health reform was a classic bait and switch: Sell a virtually unrepealable entitlement on utterly unrealistic premises and then the political class will eventually be forced to control spending.
But the political class can’t control spending. All the government mandates or price caps in the world won’t reverse the costs of the Massachusetts plan, and, when a similar system goes into effect nationwide, the problems of Massachusetts will be multiplied fifty-fold. We will have a healthcare system that simply can’t be sustained. Whom does that benefit?
Health insurance companies were vilified during the debate (if you can call ramming an unpopular bill through Congress a debate), but if they go under, we’ll regret it. I guess we’ll just have to mandate that they stay in business?
Here’s an idea: If the political class can’t control spending, then the national bill must be repealed and replaced.
