Innovation in Massachusetts. Universal health care without a single-payer system.

Updates from around the blogosphere –

Mathew Holt:
“Either the insurers will not be regulated, and the market will implode with under-insured replacing the uninsured, and consumers and providers will be equally grumpy as it’ll all have been a head-fake. Or the insurers will be properly regulated in time, and the approach I suggest will be inevitable. And frankly that’s close enough to single payer for me to be happy so long as Mitt is . . .”

Hit and Run
“One feature that seems to be lacking in the Massachusetts legislation is rolling Medicaid and SCHIP monies into vouchers that allow the poor to select the private health insurance coverage they want. Of course, the devil is in the details, but ideally by experimenting with various health insurance systems on a state by state basis, the rest of the country can learn what works and what doesn’t. Still, this could be a way to avoid national single payer government provided health insurance, aka, completely socialized medicine.”

Pazdziernik:
“I’m very interested in the exact details of this plan. My instincts at this time perceive several flaws in this altruistically sounding legislation. I am all in favor of affordable health care but the means to go achieve it as well as the end must both be just. To place higher economic burdens on the citizens of Massachusetts seems to be a move away from justice. Although affordable care that is truly for legitimate medical needs is a move towards the common good of society. As a good it should be pursued.”

Don Singleton:
“It does not matter whether they can afford to buy health care for their employees or not. I bet we find a lot of small businesses with 10 to 20 part time workers firing half their staff and having nine employees working overtime.”

The Editorials of E. Desiderius:
“The plan does not socialize the system, yet provides multiple avenues to ensure coverage: raising revenue from business who do not provide coverage, encouraging and requiring the purchase of private insurance from those who can afford it, and covering those who are the most vulnerable and least able to pay for good coverage. And the plan does not create a situation where the standard of care in the state will be lowered dramatically, if at all.”

Kate Steadman:
“What’s more; this is a major experiment. It will demonstrate how affordable these programs are, what major flaws the program didn’t for see, what major benefits the program brought, even how easy or difficult it is to get the chronically uninsured into insurance. Everything that goes on under the program will be carefully watched by universal insurance advocates.

I would, however, really like to see an EMR initiative along with this legislation, but I guess that’s too many birds to kill at once. Hopefully HIT pushes can be adopted in the next few years.”