Oops…
While Hawaii’s “Prepaid Health Care Act” required employers to provide health insurance for employees working twenty hours per week or more, there is no such requirement to provide coverage for employees working less than twenty hours per week. On top of that increasing health care costs, insurance premiums, employer costs, prescription drug costs, long-term care costs, together with the growing number of uninsured individuals, and inadequate Medicaid reimbursements have led to uninsured over 10%… and unmangeable costs.
Ah… but that is old news. Surely the brilliance of bipartisan compromise (always a good thing, right?) in Massachusetts must have led to their mandated plan being a runaway success?
… The big winners in the Schwarzenegger and Massachusetts health plans are private health insurance firms. The new insurance mandates will hand them billions in wasteful administrative fees that do not occur in government insurance programs such as Medicare. Private insurers will continue their cream-skimming, enrolling primarily the low cost, healthy workforce and their families, while leaving the costs of the unprofitable sick and elderly to the taxpayers….
Total dollars are not the problem. We already are spending enough on health care to provide high-quality, comprehensive services for everyone. But our inefficient, private-sector insurance bureaucracies have failed and need to be replaced with single-payer national health insurance. Every other developed nation has covered its citizens through some form of non-profit national health insurance.
Here’s the part I don’t get: With all the actual programs out there… the various real world systems in place throughout every other country in the developed world, why do some in the U.S. keep insisting on inventing new and untried Rube Goldberg systems of care? …
read DrSteveB’s full post on daily Kos and make a comment
Check out the MassCare.org website to get involved in a state-based campaign for sustainable universal health care and HealthCare-Now’s website for this work on the national level.
