Conference Committee Report
Health Care Access and Affordability
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
4/3/2006
This Conference Committee Report contains a comprehensive plan for increasing health insurance coverage for all residents of Massachusetts.
This bill is a bridge between principles in the House and Senate bills, H 4479 and S 2282. The bill would redeploy current public funds to more effectively cover currently uninsured low-income populations, and would make quality health coverage more affordable for all residents of the Commonwealth. The bill promotes individual responsibility by creating a requirement that everyone who can afford health insurance obtain it, while also responding to concerns about barriers to health care access. Provisions in the bill aim at achieving nearly universal health insurance coverage, but also maintain a strong safety net that has historically distinguished the state. Finally, the bill would ensure that the Massachusetts Medicaid program complies with the terms of the new federal waiver, maintaining continued receipt of annual payments from the federal Medicaid program.
http://www.mass.gov/legis/summary.pdf
House Act No. 4850
http://www.mass.gov/legis/bills/house/ht04/ht04850.htm
And…
Lobbyists took in $7.5m on health bill
By Scott Helman
The Boston Globe
April 5, 2006
The House and Senate both passed the healthcare bill overwhelmingly yesterday, sending it to Governor Mitt Romney, who is expected to sign the bill, though he may veto some components of it.
Lobbyists for hospitals, insurance companies, and other major players in the healthcare industry were paid at least $7.5 million in 2005 as the Legislature took up a major healthcare bill, records show.
The bill provides a potential boon to health plan providers such as Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, each of whom spent six-figure sums on lobbying in 2005. The healthcare bill calls for tens of thousands of uninsured people to purchase new subsidized insurance plans, which means insurers stand to get many new customers. For lower-income people, the state will help pay for private insurance coverage.
Comment: By Don McCanne, M.D.
Our goal is affordable, comprehensive health care for everyone. This bill meets the private insurers’ goal of an expanded market for their administrative excesses.
This bill supposedly promises comprehensive benefits for 99 percent of Massachusetts residents, at an affordable cost for all. But where’s the money? As an example of the nebulousness of the funding, employers who do not provide insurance for their employees will be assessed $295 per uninsured employee per year, if Gov. Romney doesn’t line-item veto even that provision. What would that buy?
Also, though they contend that benefits are comprehensive, the legislation does allow innovations such as health savings accounts and policies for the young invincibles providing “only the coverage they need,” such as coverage for skateboard fractures. There is question as to how much benefit innovation will be allowed.
No attempt will be made here to cover the many flaws in this legislation. Suffice it to say that the stand-alone goal of near-universal coverage is not adequate. The coverage must be truly universal, truly comprehensive, and truly affordable. Enlisting the private insurers will bring us far more administrative services than we can afford, but the insurers, in turn, will fail the back-of-the-envelope test. As they craft pseudo-comprehensive plans for everyone, they’ll have the same question that we have: where’s the money?
Well, it’s already there. We simply need to take it away from the insurers and spend it on health care. We could do that merely by adopting an efficient, single-payer system.