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Chris Christie Didn’t Study Massachusetts Health Care, Either.

March 21, 2014 By brian

NJ Governor and Chair of the Republican Governors Association, Chris Christie, never did a study of traffic on the George Washington Bridge.

He apparently never studied health care in Massachusetts, either.

Yesterday, his RGA issued a statement, saying, “ObamaCare has turned into a disaster for Massachusetts.” That’s just wrong, in so many ways.

Yes, the website and eligibility system being built by the Health Connector and MassHealth are not working yet.

But overall, any fair assessment would conclude that the Affordable Care Act has been an enormous benefit for the people of Massachusetts.

  • The ACA is good for our seniors, who are saving money on their prescription drugs.The ACA closes the “donut hole” that left seniors with no Medicare drug coverage as their drug costs increased. In 2013, this saved over 67,000 Massachusetts seniors who hit the donut hole an average of $823.
  • The ACA is good for our young adults, who can stay on their parent’s plan until they’re 26.The ACA improved on the Massachusetts law, which only allowed young adults to stay on their parent’s plan for two years.
  • The ACA is good for our small businesses, which get tax credits to cover their employees. In Massachusetts, around 64,000 small businesses (roughly 2/3 of all of them) are eligible for federal tax credits to help them offer coverage to their workers.
  • The ACA is good for moderate income people, who can now get help with their insurance premiums. The ACA provides premium-lowering tax credits to families making between $70,000 and $94,000 (for a family of 4) who previously did not get any help in Massachusetts.
  • The ACA is good for people with disabilities, who can now enroll in One Care plans that provide more benefits and more care for people who receive both MassHealth and Medicare coverage.
  • The ACA is good for all of our health because well over 780,000 people in our state have already received free preventive services – such as mammograms and colonoscopies – or a free annual wellness visit with their doctor. The ACA has also invested in electronic medical records for Massachusetts, and expanded capacity at Community Health Centers.
  • The ACA is good for the overall economy, as it reduces the load on state taxpayers, and also lowers the federal deficit.

Even with the atrocious website problems, Massachusetts officials have used flexibility in the ACA to expand coverage. Some 300,000 people were placed into new, better, coverage automatically, bypassing the website.Tens of thousands more people have coverage today than before 2014. For example, over 35,000 formerly uninsured people got added to MassHealth in January, due to the ACA.

We all have lots more work to do, of course. But national health reform has been very good for Massachusetts.

Brian Rosman
Health Care For All

 

(updated to update average donut hole savings with new federal numbers that just came out)

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Comments

  1. jbrach2014 says

    March 21, 2014 at 3:29 pm

    Everything mentioned above is great. Now, if we can just convince our lawmakers to adopt single-payer, we will be in an even better place than we are currently!

  2. dennisbyron says

    March 21, 2014 at 3:55 pm

    Brian, You know you are in trouble when you have to lead a defense of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in Massachusetts with the donut hole deception.

    You claim “In 2013, (the ACA) saved Massachusetts seniors who hit the donut hole an average of $1,228.”

    Of course, what you really mean is that PPACA maybe saved maybe 1% of Massachusetts seniors (maybe 10,000 of us out of 1,200,000) who make more than $57,000 a year some money they can use for walking around cash on their annual cruise in the Caribbean. All the rest of us Massachusetts seniors either didn’t fall into the hole in the first place (94% of us) or had insurance that covered the hole through Part D or a former employer (a couple of percent) or fell in the hole but qualified for Prescription Advantage even though not receiving Extra Help (estimated 4% of us or so; state hasn’t released data for a few years).

    Of course low-income seniors on Extra Help have never been subject to the donut hole anyways since that Part D program you Bluemass guys all hate was created.

  3. brian says

    March 21, 2014 at 4:44 pm

    Thanks Dennis for the note, and for pointing me to the new numbers.

    I was looking at an older document, from last March, so I updated the numbers on the blog post.

    For the 67,000 people in Massachusetts (and 4.3 million nationally) that are being helped, closing the donut hole is a big deal.

    Insurance also buys one piece of mind and certainty, so the closing of the donut hole also helps people who don’t have expenses that go that high. Whenever I talk to groups, they can’t understand the original design of Part D – it just seems wrong to yank away coverage right when you need it. Closing the donut hole means a lot to people, from a fairness perspective.

    Brian

    • dennisbyron says

      March 22, 2014 at 5:25 am

      Sorry but as I said in the initial comment, you don’t understand the statistics. Or possibly you do and you are propagandizing.

      Of the 67,000 people on Medicare that you and the CMS cite as being “helped by PPACA” in Massachusetts, about 57,000 didn’t need the help and the remaining approximately 10,000 are wealthy, in the top 5% or so of the senior-citizen net-worth distribution (but unfortunately they must be quite sick because they need so much expensive medication). Is your new slogan: “Health Care for the 1%” instead of “Health Care for All?”

      [I can’t be more precise about the number because the state of Massachusetts — as you know — stopped releasing these sorts of statistics because the numbers disproved almost every point proponents of RomneyCare had previously claimed. And as we are seeing, everything that went wrong with Massachusetts’ health care system under the now defunct RomneyCare is happening nationally under PPACA. For the same reasons.]

      • kirth says

        March 22, 2014 at 9:07 am

        Are you this Dennis Byron? The one who believes that USA Today is “far-left-wing?”

        Because if you are, I think it would inform people’s decisions about whether to engage with you.

    • afertig says

      March 24, 2014 at 11:54 am

      From Politico Pulse:

      DONUT HOLE SHRINKING – Boy does the administration loves to tout Obamacare’s progress in closing the prescription drug “donut hole.” Latest numbers were out last week: about 7.9 million Medicare beneficiaries have saved nearly $9.9 billion on drugs since the law was passed, which comes out to about $1,265 per person. http://go.cms.gov/1nKPbjA

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