Massachusetts Health Care Law Could Spread to Other States
WASHINGTON, April 18- The new Massachusetts health care law could set a precedent for reform in states across the country, a panel of policy makers said Tuesday.
Ron Pollack, executive director and vice president of Families USA, a nonpartisan health care policy organization, said states across the country are “frustrated with the gridlock” in Congress over comprehensive health reform.
“So many states are feeling they cannot wait when they’ve got so many people who are suffering because increasing numbers of people are uninsured,” Pollack said during a panel discussion sponsored by Families USA at the National Press Club. “Here the steps at the federal level, if anything, are exacerbating the problem.”
The Massachusetts law, Pollack said, will be reviewed by other states as a model on how to approach health care legislation.
“Make no mistake about it, this legislation should be widely acclaimed as a breakthrough,” he said.
The Massachusetts law requires every resident who lacks coverage to buy health insurance.
States that want to institute similar reforms should look at what was done in Massachusetts “less as a policy blueprint and more as a political blueprint,” said John McDonough, executive director of Health Care for All, an organization that advocates for universal health care.
“One of the lessons we learned from other states such as Maine is that voluntary doesn’t get you where you want to go,” McDonough said. “If you really want to achieve a dramatic breakthrough in expansion of coverage, you have to be willing to take the political heat and political risk.”
A Massachusetts legislative conference committee report found that an estimated 550,000 people in the state are without health insurance. Salvatore F. DiMasi, D-Third Suffolk, the speaker of the Massachusetts House and one of the Press Club panelists, said he risked ending his political career to pass the health care bill.
“We had to make sure that people were taken care of in a way that they wouldn’t have to worry about their health insurance,” DiMasi said. “They wouldn’t have to have the anxiety of knowing whether they would be taken care of if they did get sick or if their children got sick.”
Everyone – both liberals and conservatives – was involved in some aspect of the law’s passage, DiMasi said.
“Whether you’re an individual, employer, whether you’re state or federal government, a provider or an insurer, everyone must participate in this legislation,” he said. “That’s the reason this legislation has a chance at being successful.”
The new law, however, may not be applicable to all states. According to McDonough, a larger state such as Texas, in which close to a fourth of its adult population is without health insurance, would have a more difficult time writing a bill like the Massachusetts law. The new law does not require a tax increase because the state can support the program through its budget surplus.
In 1974, Hawaii passed a law requiring every business with more than 10 workers to offer health coverage to their employees.
Some Massachusetts businesses during the past 16 months have worried about the implications of becoming responsible under state law for their employees’ health insurance, said panelist Philip J. Edmundson, chief executive officer of William Gallagher Associates, an insurance brokerage firm based in Boston.
“Most businesses find that government telling them they have to do still another thing to be a different kind of revolution,” Edmundson said. “Entrepreneurs and business leaders don’t tend to find that to be a good way to start a debate about health care.”
However, he said, the new law presents a “great opportunity to educate people in the business community.”
In the past, companies have had mixed feelings when various laws such as the minimum wage and Social Security went on the books, Edmundson said. Once businesses find their role in the process they want “to become engaged,” he said, and in Massachusetts they helped to shape the legislation.
John Holahan, director of health policy at the Urban Institute, an economic research organization, said the Massachusetts law “provides a structure to get to universal health care.”
Although the law won’t take effect until next summer, DiMasi said that if the legislation needs to be changed “to reflect unintended consequences,” the legislature will act to fix it.
“It’s only the beginning of health care reform,” he said. “The implementation is where the success will be.”
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