Many politicians from Beacon Hill and beyond likely took pause this weekend after The Boston Globe revealed the commonwealth’s innovative health care plan will reach more than eight times its 2007 fiscal year budget within four years. The State House will need to make painful cuts in coverage and tap into an already stressed budget again if legislators want to preserve this audacious plan.
Universal health care is a good idea, and no state or national lawmaker should abandon it because of added costs. Goals of insuring every citizen will have to adjust to fiscal realities, however, and by rights every lawmaker should be totally forthcoming about the true costs of keeping the plan. Still, while State House legislators scramble to keep the state program afloat, Massachusetts voters can expect plenty of hand-wringing half-truths instead of cold facts.
Though Massachusetts’s Commonwealth Connector is unprecedented, the troubles surrounding it are nothing new — voters signal to politicians that it pays to have a backup plan and to prepare for the worst. Those elected officials who plan ahead face tough times gaining and keeping their seats while delivering the sobering truth, but rookies become incumbents only by maintaining this outlook through fat and lean times. Those politicians who promise everything without preparing learn the hard way that voters will blame them for any problems in government, even if the official had no control over these events.
President Bush learned this with his disastrous plan to invade Iraq. Despite the thousands of lives and trillions of dollars at stake, he failed to plan for the prospect of a protracted insurgency by expecting Iraqis to welcome U.S. troops. Though Bush never should have gone to war in the first place, his poor planning made a bad situation worse. Now Gov. Deval Patrick will likely face the consequences of an increasingly costly program, even if his predecessor Mitt Romney engineered it.
As for Romney, the presidential hopeful’s already faltering campaign will still have a hard time avoiding the negative press associated with this timely revelation. The candidate had a hard enough time before convincing conservative foes that the universal health care plan he approved as governor is not the kind of socialized medicine Republican constituents so abhor. Now, what looks to be a billion-dollar boondoggle will dog his claims of fiscal conservatism.
The Democratic candidates are not immune either. Both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama favor aggressive health care reforms that would call for subsidized care working in tandem with private insurers. Both pledge to pay by repealing tax cuts to the rich, but with Massachusetts own small-scale example of unforeseen costs calling their predictions into question, both candidates may have to revise them.
Of course, Americans will likely have to wait for such candidness until after the election, when the next president faces the inevitable task of explaining how his or her platform must adjust to the realities of congressional infighting. Actually, the biggest adjustments will come because of reality.