Legislators in Massachusetts in collaboration with Gov. Deval Patrick are close to producing a bill that would completely revamp the state’s health care system for the second time in a decade. Former governor and current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney signed into law in 2006 a provision that expanded coverage to the extent that only two percent of residents and less than one percent of children in Massachusetts are uninsured. The only problem with this law was that it caused the cost of health care to skyrocket to 15 percent above the national average last year, according to The New York Times.
Under the current system, providers charge customers on a single fee-for-service basis, which creates incentive for excessive procedures and medical visits. Patrick and other Massachusetts legislators are attempting to change this so that networks would receive an annual flat global fee for the care of each patient, and patients would in turn be charged a flat rate instead being charged by the number of procedures. Additionally, providers would receive higher payment for patients who have greater health risks and bonuses for high-quality care.
This new idea of a flat rate would completely reinvigorate the health care system in Massachusetts in that it would prevent corruption and eliminate unnecessary fees for patients, which would greatly curb exorbitant health care costs.
Additionally, one of the most disconcerting problems with health care in the U.S. is that those who are truly in need of extensive coverage and procedures are unable to receive them. If providers are given more money to take on these higher-risk patients, then they will be more likely to take them on and those who need health care the most can obtain it without issue.
Ultimately, if the billing turns into a flat rate, patients might end up having to pay more for a checkup or an annual flu shot, but they would also end up paying less for larger, more serious procedures. The distribution of expenses would be more even and take the weight off of high-risk patients’ shoulders to fuel the exorbitantly expensive system.
This bill would completely change the face of Massachusetts health care, and perhaps work toward fixing the crumbling system in the U.S. as a whole.
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Are you kids being taught the misrepresentations stated above or just practicing to be kneejerk-Democrat journaists (which means rather than doing any independent journalism, you just repeat what the chief kneejerk Democratic journalist says each morning in the New York Times)? Assuming the latter, you did not read the Times carefully on Tuesday morning.
As the Times reports but you missed apparently, no pending legislation will “change the face” of Massachusetts healthcare. It only affects healthcare delivery mechanisms for about 25% of the population. That 25% includes those on Medicaid and RomneyCare and — here’s the reason its ideas have been kicking around the state house for a long time — state employees. It will put them all in HMOs, a faied idea from before you were born which many peope disike intensely. The bil does not include any changes in “the face of healthcare” for those on Medicare and those that are privately insured (the other 75% of us), other than it will probaby further distort the market and what we pay just as RomneyCare has.
The legislators are trying mightily to kick it down the road. Do some independent journalism and see how many cost-counci meetings and EOHHS seminars and legislative hearings there have been on all of this academic mumbo jumbo for the last three years and ask yourselves why nothing is happening.