By Kristen Gerencher
MarketWatch, Jan. 22, 2010
[The following is an excerpt from an article titled “Unexpected lessons from Massachusetts” about the impact of Scott Brownās election to the Senate from Massachusetts. For the full article, click on the link at the end.]
The message from Massachusetts voters was “rather muddled,” said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, professor of medicine at Harvard University and an internist in Boston.
“It’s not that people in Massachusetts are profoundly unhappy with the [reform] in Massachusetts but seem to feel it’s irrelevant,” said Woolhandler, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program.
People are rightfully concerned that the benefits of the bills are too meager compared with the costs, she said.
A Medicare-for-all approach would produce hundreds of billions of dollars in annual savings due to the lower administrative costs that come from cutting out the middleman, Woolhandler said.
“I know that’s not what the private insurance industry wants to hear and they’re very powerful, but the only way that we can afford universal health care is through a Medicare-for-all model,” she said.
“We need to learn from other countries what works, and the message is national nonprofit health insurance works and what they’re doing in Washington and what we’ve done in Massachusetts is not the solution.”
Woolhandler said she didn’t root for Scott Brown’s victory, but that his election raised the chances for a Medicare-for-all approach down the line “because it’s obvious we have to do something else, something different from what we’ve been doing.”
Such a large-scale change is less of a long shot now, [John] Holahan [director of the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington] said. If health reform dies this year, within a decade there will be demand at least for Medicare as an option, with income subsidies similar to what’s in the current bills — and the potential for Medicare for all isn’t out of the question either, he said.
“I almost think you’d have to because of the budget implications and the health implications and financial pressure on health-care institutions,” Holahan said. “If the uninsured rate goes to 60, 70 million over next decade, that’s an awful lot of people who can’t afford to pay.”
Kristen Gerencher is a reporter for MarketWatch in San Francisco. MarketWatch is part of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-health-reform-may-survive-browns-win-2010-01-22?pagenumber=1