Health Care in Massachusetts: State Prepares to Completely Screw Poor People

Image of Mass. General Hospital tagged “Bostonist” by Flickr user Grey Sky . We know that the Massachusetts budget is in bad shape. Legislators have slashed spending by $2.4 billion while drumming up $1 billion in new taxes. The Turnpike Authority is doomed , and the MBTA still doesn’t have the $400 million it will need to avoid service cuts and fare increases. And, the state’s universal health care program is in mortal danger. Now, we have the news that the Connector Authority, the agency that oversees the health care program, plans to slash $115 million from Commonwealth Care, the program that subsidizes insurance for low income residents. And how will the savings come? Trickery. The Globe explains : The largest share of the savings will come from slowing enrollment. An estimated 18,000 poor residents who qualify for full subsidies, but who forget to designate a health plan, will no longer be automatically assigned a plan and enrolled and thus could face delays in getting care. Surely, there is no way that this brilliant strategy could backfire. Other savings will come when Commonwealth Care stops paying for dental insurance for 92,000 poor people and when it dumps legal immigrants from the insurance rolls. Some taxpayers are more equal than others. It’s obvious that our health care overhaul has been a mess. Darshak Sanghavi, a doctor at

UMass, has an excellent column in Slate today about how broadly the plan has failed. Sanghavi’s point, that cheap insurance with high deductibles doesn’t actually improve anybody’s health, will be made all the more poignant when poor families find themselves not enrolled in programs that they thought they had signed up for. Sanghavi summarizes his point: The expensive Massachusetts plan is not well-designed to systematically improve anyone’s health. Instead, it’s a superficial effort to clear the uninsured from the books and then clumsily limit further costs by discouraging care. Timothy Cahill, who will likely take on Governor Deval Patrick in next year’s election, thinks we should ditch the whole program , calling it, gallingly, a “luxury.” (Blue Mass Group thinks it means that he will run as an independent .) Right wing think tanks agree with Cahill. With Congressional Democrats bailing on federal public health care plans , but President Obama remaining outspoken in favor of it, there is little clarity from the federal level to elucidate Massachusetts’s options. Certainly, we, like the majority of residents, support universal health care in the Commonwealth, but the current system is badly flawed. And we need to figure out a way to fix it without screwing our most financially vulnerable neighbors.

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Health Care in Massachusetts: State Prepares to Completely Screw Poor People