the new health law will force everyone who is uninsured 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”?
There IS another way, folks. for state-level health reform check out www.masscare.org and www.healthcareformass.org and www.defendhealth.org, and for national-level health reform have a look at www.healthcare-now.org (sorry i couldn’t get links to work)
