Another in a series of public information town meetings organized by Senator Pat Jehlen. Her state budget forum this spring was impressively useful.
Health Care in Massachusetts
A town meeting briefing on the Hows and Whys of the new health care laws. Is everyone covered by insurance? Who? How? Why? Why Not?
Learn how the decisions that may be made impact you and your relatives and friends – and others.
Here’s the lineup for this evening:
- Senator Pat Jehlen, and Representativess Paul Donato, Carl Sciortino, Denise Provost, Tim Toomey, Paul Casey, and Patrick Natale
- Panelist Melissa Shannon from Health Care for All: Law and Imprementation
- Panelist Lisa Vinikoor from Greater Boston Interfaith Organization: Affordability, Organizing Efforts
Thursday, October 26, 2006
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Grace Church Parish Hall
(near Medford Square – parking in the rear of the church)
Members of the audience will have the opportunity to contribute ideas and ask questions. Refreshments will be served. For more information, call Senator Jehlen’s office at 617-722-1578.
When she says “opportunity to contribute and ask questions” she means it. It’s not just listening to presentations. At the budget forum, I learned from other people’s questions that I’d never have thought to ask. Local officials, including mayors and school committee members, told the legislators about things happening in their budgets, asked questions, and made requests – as did other audience members. It’s a back and forth with a bunch of legislators, and knowledgeable panelists. Come!
My brother is a bartender for a place with no benefits. He makes about 35,000 a year. He pays out of pocket for bare-bones individual plan which is planning to double in price this re-openning period.
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Will there be any help for him in this coming year?
Aside from the Commonwealth Care program, which provides subsidized benefits to individuals earning up to 300% of the federal poverty level (about 30,000 for a single adult), there will be health insurance products offered through the Connector deemed “affordable products” the individuals can purchase on a pre-tax basis. These products will not be available until next spring. This program is still being developed so there is little available information.
I’ll be seeing him at a local rally to support Dems tomorrow night.
I attended the forum tonight and it was very good.
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I would suggest that your brother call Health Care For All’s Helpline at 1-800-272-4232. They would be able to answer your question based on his specific income and family information.
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They also have a website which has a lot of information you might find helpful. http://www.hcfama.org/
he will be in a pickle after the changes in his HCHP go into effect
the Oct 26 Jehlen health care forum begs the question which unfortunately i cannot ask directly having just found out about the event the nite of: does Pat Jehlen think Chapter 58 is a good piece of health reform legislation?
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the law’s health insurance expansion content is rightly being summed up by many as “Leave no insurance compnay behind” and “Trojan horse legislation”. does Jehlen (one of my very few heroes in the legislature) really think this is good healthcare reform?
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to my and many others’ thinking it is obscene how much OF OUR MONEY the “nonprofit” insurance industry in MA wastes as they divert huge amounts of healthcare resources away from care to be spent on excessive administration and marketing.
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the new health law will force everyone to buy a commercial insurance product, sold at a profit, with NO RULES about how the insurers spend the money. this includes the huge sums coming from the state budget to purchase the subsidized policies for those people earning under 300% FPL. state budget monies that need to be used to fully fund many other essential social programs.
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I’m all for helping folks that need it to have good health insurance coverage, but not without some responsible stewardship for how our state budget funds are spent. and i think it’s reasonable to expect some state oversight and rules for how the nonprofit tax-exempt insurers and hospital systems spend the monies they collect. does anybody else have a problem with hundreds of millions in profits being made and million dollar salaries being doled out by these nonprofits while our insurance premiums are being raised again and again?
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It is inconceivable to me how any honest thinking person can applaud this insurance expansion law. the MA Democratic legislature has air-tight veto power over romney, so i think it’s garbage that the media and others have said it was a very “difficult bi-partisan compromise”. the media coverage has been so lazy, or intentionally misleading on this one. gimme a break.
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the final propduct of this health law is so far afield from what Health Care For All, GBIO, and Speaker DiMasi were pushing for in their original bills. Chapter 58 is all about the money. the corporate money that controls our legislature. and once again it’s the voters and the ordinary folks who lose and lose and lose.
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when Chap 58 became law, instantly $25 million was taken from the state budget to establish the new “Insurance Connector Authority” and its programs. is this what we need to address and remedy the causes of our health care crisis? a new cumbersome layer of bureaucracy? one that uses taxpayer dollars to funnel more business to the private insurance industry and to chase down and fine folks who don’t pony up for this new “individual mandate”?
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There IS another way, folks. for state-level health reform check out http://www.masscare.org and http://www.healthcareformass.org and for national-level health reform have a look at http://www.Healthcare-now.org (sorry i couldn’t get links to work)
does anybody else have a problem with hundreds of millions in profits being made and million dollar salaries being doled out by these nonprofits while our insurance premiums are being raised again and again?
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I’m more of a non-profit guy when it comes to medical insurance, but regarding salaries: I don’t have a problem with a non-profit paying something like market based salaries to executives. Otherwise, you end up with second-rate managememt, which could be far more expensive to rate payers in the long run. I do think executive salaries are far too high, but financial mismanagement is much more costly…
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The president/CEO of Fallon in 2004 made about $415K. I guess that’s a lot of money, but not out of line with the responsibilities of such a large HMO. High CEO pay may be annoying but it’s not the cause, nor solution to high medical. Seriously, total officer comp at Fallon was probably about $2.0 million. That’s out of revenues over $700 million. Eliminate all of the officer comp. and insurance rates will drop by pennies.
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Rising medical costs may just be one of those things we can’t solve in an aging demographic. After Chapter 58, realistically or politically, it’s just not going to happen until Chapter 58 succeeds, in which case you’ll never see single payer; or fails, in which case, who knows what will happen. My guess is, in Massachusetts, Chapter 58 will succeed and continue.
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But you are right. I think it really is Trojan Horse Legislation, but maybe not for the same reason you think it is.
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MHO: Legislature knows that all state employees get 85% of their insurance paid and the number is growing double-digitally. Add active employee coverage to retiree coverage (also growing) and even the skillet-heads in the Legislature know the state budget can’t handle it over the next decade.
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I think the
Trojan Horseplan is, sooner or later, to give each state employee a raise, sufficient to buy his or her own health insurance. Because Chapter 58 will have encouraged the development of new policies, the argument will be that with the raise that insurance is affordable and available to all.<
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I’ve seen this happen often in private industry. I bet Senator Moore has also seen it.
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The raise to all won’t save or cost the state money, but will take the inflation out of the State’s (Town’s?) budget and put it in the employee’s pocketbook.
If Pat Jehlen had her way, we’d have universal health care coverage funded by taxes, not employers, and we’d all be on the same plan. But that’s not what this forum was about. We have the reform law we have, it can help a lot of people, and she put this forum together so we can learn more about it, and so that legislators can find out what question and concerns we have. It was not a “Is Chapter 58 a good idea?” forum.
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(Though Jehlen’s closing statement did hint at her frustration, and she did lament that there’s not yet enough political will in the legislature for single payer)
Can someone put up a link to the bill? I especially would like to see a skinny version if there is one out there to read. I left off paying attention to this when the Senate, House and Executive versions of the bill were laid out in the newspapers a few months ago.
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One thing is that I can’t adequately comment on it without better understanding.
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If I lost track of it—– I assume that I am not the only one.
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