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What was the road to hell paved with again….
Posted by Duncan on January 14th, 2009
To much fanfare from both right and left in 2006, Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to require all residents to buy health insurance. A new state health insurance clearinghouse was created, with taxpayers subsidizing those who couldn’t afford to buy coverage. Then Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, promised that “every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance.” Yet just two years later, Romney’s much-heralded “solution” — touted by many as the model for a national program — has become an embarrassing flop.
Just a year after the universal coverage law passed, The New York Times reported, state insurers were already jacking up rates to twice the national average. According to Dr. Paul Hsieh, a physician and founding member of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine, 43 mandatory benefits — including those that many people did not want or need, such as invitro fertilization — raised the costs of coverage for Massachusetts residents by as much as 56 percent, depending upon an individual’s income status. So much for “affordable” health care.
As someone famous once said somewhere this one time, I am dying of surprise. Whenever government gets involved, things just don’t seem to get better… but The View from Chaos Manor says it best here:
Of course once you admit that the Federal Government has power over some area of human endeavor, sooner or later it will create a bureaucracy to assert that power, and Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy will take over, assuring that the area of endeavor will be choked by rules, all well meant. Congress Shall Make No Law becomes something less than an absolute restriction, and Congress hands out doles and earmarked funds but only if the states adopt whatever it is Congress thinks will be best for everyone, and meanwhile the courts hold that window washers are engaged in interstate commerce because they might be washing windows for an office suite that has someone working in it who is importing goods from another state, and suddenly federal minimum wage laws, are valid, and soon Congress will be able to say that a union goon can intimidate you into signing a card so they don’t have to have a secret ballot election to make you join the union to keep your job. Welcome to freedom tempered by good intentions.
Exactly. I highlight places where the Federal Government has made a power grab, through the power of the purse by Congress, or by judicial fiat through the Supreme Court. And it is always “for the children”, or “for our own good”, or “we need this”. No asks should we do this. Or can we do this. And we find ourselves following the same failures of socialism, skipping down that same path. Now we have one party almost completely in control over the Federal Government, whose agendas are more big government, with all of the nanny-state intrusions that comes with it. Going to be great 4 years comrades… a great 4 years…
January 14th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
There’s an article in the Boston Globe shouting out how seniors must now pay an average of over 700.00/month for the medications- since MassHealth went into effect. Before the average was just over 100.00
There aren’t enough doctors in medical rich MA…people are waiting upwards of a yr for a physical now. Urgent care is a joke. All this so that a very small group of people can be insured for…free.
January 15th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
What do you mean, “It’s going to be a great four years, comrades…”? The country we were raised in no longer exists, it’s been taken over by the “victims”, and His Holiness is only a logical extension of the run to any form of failed socialism.
BTW, I see this morning that the price of crude futures has dropped below $35 a barrel, yet prices at the pump are still rising dramatically. Gosh, I wonder if that has anything to do with government saving our economy?