State enacted single payer health care coming

[Spytheweb]

Single payer is more alive than ever. This issue is not going away. I don't know what Obama's public option is i think it's making sure insurance companies make a profit. But single payer is being looked at by many states as the most cost effective way to do business. I know California can save 7.6 billion a year with single payer, you think they're are going to let this past by?

Enacting single payer at the state level is how Canada got it's universal system started. This maybe fun watching private insurance running from one state to another after state after state enacts single payer.

Posted on July 27, 2009
Single-payer health care will work

Not only will it give all Delawareans universal health coverage, but also, it will save us a bundle

By FLOYD E. McDOWELL SR.
The News Journal (Delaware)
July 19, 2009

Single-payer health care reform is a no-brainer for informed citizens and credible elected political decision-makers.

Our state?s growing list of 32 statewide organizations and individuals supporting our single-payer Delaware Health Security Act will see a breakthrough in state single-payer legislation in 2010.

It?s happening elsewhere.

California?s State Legislature has twice passed a single-payer act, but both were vetoed by their Terminator governor. Former Gov. Jerry Brown, now attorney general, has announced his bid for governor in 2010, is leading in the polls and is a strong single-payer advocate. California has 43 times the population of Delaware, and if it were a nation it would have the eighth largest economy among all nations. Maine?s state legislature has passed a single-payer act, and its coalition is working to elect a governor who won?t let the Brinks truck visit and cause a veto.

Coalitions in Massachusetts, Vermont and many other states are making solid progress toward enactment of single-payer acts.

If one of these Eastern Corridor states passes single-payer reform, few private businesses will come to our state and we?ll lose more than Chrysler and GM competing in the global economy.

Many polls, at state and national levels, show that about 70 percent of citizens polled want single-payer reform. Sensible single-payer or similar public-option reform will never occur in Washington, thanks to some 40,000 well-funded lobbyists protecting this largest cash cow in our nation?s history. It?s in the states where citizens can be informed and enlisted to support this desperately needed change.

The health-care page on our coalition?s nonprofit, nonpartisan DEinformed voters.org site thoroughly explains the Delaware act.

The following is a partial list of the many research-proven, cost-effective benefits it will provide all Delaware citizens and our state:

All citizens and their families will receive comprehensive, universal health care coverage from conception until death without a cent needed for extra insurance, co-payments or deductibles. This also applies to Delaware workers and their families if the worker lives in another state and works at least 20 hours a week in Delaware.
Health-care coverage will include all services for physicians, dentists, other health-care professionals, hospitals, pharmaceutical drugs, all types of long-term care, laboratories, diagnostic technologies, our disabled citizens, mental health treatment, drug addiction treatment, and special equipment and aids.
The act will eliminate all health-care debt, now responsible for about 70 percent of personal bankruptcies. This is a big reason citizens lose their homes or can?t buy homes. Eighty percent of those filing for bankruptcy had health insurance.
It will eliminate the Medicare/Medicaid pauper requirement that one must give up all savings and property to receive long-term care assistance.
It will enable everyone?s health-care records to be electronically sent anywhere in the world, whereas only 20 percent are now being transmitted that way.
Personal health-care savings will enable hundreds of millions annually to be spent in our economy.
The act will reduce vehicle and home/building insurance cost by eliminating the personal injury liability requirement.
The act will operate like our successful single-payer Medicare program, which has an administrative/overhead cost of 1.5 percent, and will have adequate funds to properly pay all health-care providers.
Although we spend twice as much on health care as the other 29 developed nations and are ranked 37th among all nations by the World Health Organization on important health-care indicators, we?re the only developed nation that does not provide universal health-care coverage.
This act will eliminate the totally unnecessary broker health insurance industry (including AARP insurance), as they don?t contribute even a Band-Aid to any part of health care, waste about 40 percent of our state?s health-care funds via 30 percent administrative/overhead cost (tons of costly multi-payer paperwork, profits, advertising, lobbying, etc.) and a minimum of 10 percent in health-care fraud. This act will return all decision-making to physicians and other professionals, whereas now they have to get permission from health insurance industry staff for some life-or-death decisions. All citizens will choose their health-care physicians and other providers.

This act will save our state?s budget over $200 million each year in lowered costs for state employee/retiree health-care coverage and on other state-funded health-care programs. State workers would not have a salary cut and not have to pay 2 percent of salary on health-care costs.

It will be like a magnet to both attract and retain private businesses in our state. It will save private and public employers 40 percent in workmen?s compensation insurance rates. Private businesses will only pay about 10 percent into the state?s fund. Large businesses will pay less than they?re now paying, and small businesses will only contribute 3 percent, at one-half the rate of large businesses.

All state/federal funds for health care will go into the Delaware Health Security Fund. Ninety percent of our state?s health-care funds come from hard-working citizens, 70 percent from taxes and 20 percent from out-of-pocket expenses. Each taxpayer filing a Delaware tax return will be required to pay a 2.5 percent Health Security tax on net (after deductions) income. This will be less than the current and future out-of-pocket expense. This act asks our elected officials to let our citizens? funds be used to cover themselves and family members just as their tax funds now provide and offer a comprehensive health-care benefit package to each of them and their family members. What irony!

Finally, this system is not government-run.

The ruling Delaware Health Security Authority will be composed of four members from the House and Senate Health Committees, the Secretary of Health and Social Services representing the governor?s office, five representatives from statewide organizations representing health-care professionals and five from consumer groups that have endorsed single-payer reform.

Fifteen-member County Advisory Councils will be established in each county from the same sources to work with the state authority on all planning, implementation and evaluation of health-care facilities, staffing and services in each county.

Any lobbyist, politician or citizen who does the Halloween routine that this will bring the ?guvment? between you and this sensible, cost-effective health-care system is either uninformed, a pathological liar or both.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/july/s...er_health_.php

 

[DOGS THAT BARK]

it's not just coming -we've already had it--of course it's something I doubt you and Gumby would like to refer to-

With that being said I'm all for states rights to do what they think is right as long as they have to live by their convictions--and not pass the expense/bailouts to other states.

For instance-
If we had states that cut back on social programs expense--enforced illegal immigration laws to the max-reduced the 3 strike law to 2
---I would assume most in the above catagories would migrate to more "base friendly" states and everyone would be happy with the consequences and the financial results.


September 5, 2009
Massachusetts' Obama-like Reforms Increase Health Costs, Wait Times

By Michael Cannon

​

If you are curious about how President Barack Obama's health plan would affect your health care, look no farther than Massachusetts. In 2006, the Bay State enacted a slate of reforms that almost perfectly mirror the plan of Obama and congressional Democrats.
Those reforms reveal that the Obama plan would mean higher health insurance premiums for millions, would reduce choice by eliminating both low-cost and comprehensive health plans, would encourage insurers to avoid the sick and would reduce the quality of care.



Massachusetts reduced its uninsured population by two-thirds -- yet the cost would be considered staggering, had state officials not done such a good job of hiding it. Finally, Massachusetts shows where "ObamaCare" would ultimately lead: Officials are already laying the groundwork for government rationing.
The most sweeping provision in the Massachusetts reforms -- and the legislation before Congress -- is an "individual mandate" that makes health insurance compulsory. Massachusetts shows that such a mandate would oust millions from their low-cost health plans and force them to pay higher premiums.
The necessity of specifying what satisfies the mandate gives politicians enormous power to dictate the content of every American's health plan -- a power that health care providers inevitably capture and use to increase the required level of insurance.
In the three years since Massachusetts enacted its individual mandate, providers successfully lobbied to require 16 specific types of coverage under the mandate: prescription drugs, preventive care, diabetes self-management, drug-abuse treatment, early intervention for autism, hospice care, hormone replacement therapy, non-in-vitro fertility services, orthotics, prosthetics, telemedicine, testicular cancer, lay midwives, nurses, nurse practitioners and pediatric specialists.
The Massachusetts Legislature is considering more than 70 additional requirements.
Those requirements can increase premiums by 14 percent or more. Officials further increased premiums by imposing new limits on cost-sharing.
"The effect," writes the Boston Globe, "has been to provide more comprehensive insurance than in most other states but also to raise costs." Premiums are growing 21 to 46 percent faster than the national average, in part because Massachusetts' individual mandate has effectively outlawed affordable health plans.
Massachusetts long ago adopted another feature of the Obama plan: price controls that prohibit insurers from varying premiums based on a purchaser's health status. Those price controls further increase premiums for the young and healthy.
They also eliminate comprehensive health plans. Obama adviser David Cutler found that in Harvard University's price-controlled health insurance exchange, "adverse selection" or the attraction of the sickest patients caused premiums for the most comprehensive plan to rise until insurers eventually canceled it. Those price controls also encourage insurers to avoid the sick. And who can blame them, considering that the government is forcing them to sell a $50,000 policy for just $10,000?
One way insurers can avoid the $50,000 patients is to drop benefits those customers find attractive. Shelby Rogers is a 12-year-old girl with spinal muscular atrophy, whose parents chose an Aetna plan through the price-controlled health insurance exchange for federal workers. Last year, Aetna announced it would drop coverage for Shelby's 12-hour-a-day nurse, who, among other things, helps Shelby avoid bedsores by turning her over at night. An Aetna spokesman explained the reason was to avoid offering a benefit that causes the sickest patients to flock to the plan.
Over time, as mandates eliminate low-cost options and price controls eliminate comprehensive options, both the Massachusetts and Obama reforms will march consumers into a narrow range of health plans.
As goes choice, so goes quality. Statistics on waiting times for specialist care in Massachusetts read like a dispatch from Canada. In 2004, Boston already had the longest waits among metropolitan areas. By 2009, waits had generally shortened in other metro areas (average wait: less than three weeks) but lengthened in Boston (average wait: seven weeks), according to the Merritt Hawkins survey.
Voters who believe the Massachusetts law reduced the quality of care outnumber those who believe it helped by nearly 3-to-1 (29 percent to 10 percent).
Massachusetts has reduced the share of its population that lacks coverage from an estimated 8.3 percent in 2006 to an estimated 2.6 percent by June 2008. Former Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican who signed the Massachusetts reforms into law, boasts that "no other state has made as much progress in covering their uninsured."
Yet that achievement carries an exorbitant price tag: at least $2.1 billion this year, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a figure that doesn't even include the cost of the additional coverage discussed above. Since Massachusetts has covered just 432,000 previously uninsured residents, the cost of covering a previously uninsured family of four -- at least $20,000 -- is well above the average cost of an employer-sponsored family policy (about $13,000).
Had state officials not done their level best to hide those costs -- the individual mandate pushed 60 percent of the cost off-budget, while expanding eligibility for Medicaid pushed another 20 percent onto the federal budget -- no one would be hailing Massachusetts as a model.
As it is, Massachusetts has fooled some prominent watchdogs. The Boston Globe editorializes that the cost to the state taxpayer is "about $88 million a year," when the actual cost to state taxpayers is 19 times that amount, and the total cost is 24 times that amount.
The New York Times editorial page's account of the law's cost was only off by a factor of three.
Nevertheless, those costs are appearing in higher taxes and health insurance premiums. State officials have raised taxes on tobacco, hospitals, insurers and employers, as well as eliminated coverage for many legal immigrants just to scrape up their 20 percent share of the cost. They are also showing the nation where ObamaCare would ultimately lead: government-imposed rationing.
To cope with the cost of its reforms, Massachusetts created a legislative commission that has recommended moving the entire market to a single, Canadian-style payment system that would encourage doctors and hospitals to ration care.
The Legislature also plans to leverage its power under the individual mandate to require "evidence-based purchasing strategies," which is another way of saying government bureaucrats may soon be deciding who gets medical care and who does not.
When former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin whipped people into a frenzy over "death panels," she was warning not only against a proposal for end-of-life counseling but plans that would make it easier for Medicare to use its existing power to try to ration care to the elderly and disabled.
Massachusetts shows that Obama's individual mandate would expand federal power by enabling it to ration care to patients under age 65.
Though initially popular, enthusiasm for the Massachusetts reforms may be on the wane. A recent poll found that more Massachusetts voters say the law has made health insurance less affordable (27 percent) than believe it has made coverage more affordable (21 percent). Voters who believe the reforms have been a failure outnumber those who believe the reforms have been a success by 37 percent to 26 percent.

 

[Spytheweb]

The system Masscare is using now made one big mistake, they allowed private insurance to be a player in the game, so what happens? Costs go up.

Massachusetts is looking to enact single payer health care and save 1.8-3.6 billion dollars.

December 1998: Massachusetts
Two fiscal studies of single payer for the Massachusetts Medical Society show savings & benefits:

Lewin Group Solutions for Progress/Boston University School of Public Health (SFP/BUSPH)
?In early 1997, the Massachusetts Medical Society retained the services of two consulting teams to independently analyze the relative costs of a Canadian style single-payer system, and the current multi-payer health care system in Massachusetts.?

?While Lewin and SFP/BUSPH reports differed in their orientations and methodologies, they reached similar conclusions. First, a single-payer system would achieve significant administrative savings [between $1.8 and $3.6 billion] over the current multi-payer system. Secondly, these savings are of such a magnitude that the available funds would be sufficient to insure universal coverage in the state and provide comprehensive benefits including outpatient medications and long-term care and eliminate all out-of-pocket payments (co-payments, deductibles).?

?The major difference in the studies findings had to do with the timing of achieving the cost savings. SFP/BUSPH estimated that the savings could be in the first year of implementation of the system. Lewin felt the savings would begin in year six.?

Source: (Massachusetts Medical Society House of Delegates Report 207, A-99 (B).
Full text of the studies are available online at: http://www.massmed.org/pages/lewin.asp)

http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single_payer_system_cost.php?page=all

 

[Spytheweb]

Dogs that bark:

"If you are curious about how President Barack Obama's health plan would affect your health care, look no farther than Massachusetts. In 2006, the Bay State enacted a slate of reforms that almost perfectly mirror the plan of Obama and congressional Democrats.
Those reforms reveal that the Obama plan would mean higher health insurance premiums for millions, would reduce choice by eliminating both low-cost and comprehensive health plans, would encourage insurers to avoid the sick and would reduce the quality of care."

Spytheweb: single payer would save America 286 billion dollars a year!!! It's no wonder it's off the table for crooked congressman and private insurance.

HR 676 is only 30 pages long, it is single payer universal health care. If this bill does not make it at the federal level it will be enacted at the state level. This is not HR 3200 which will be a windfall for insurance companies requiring everyone to have insurance. HR 676 kicks insurance to the curb and takes their money and puts it back into the system for care for Americans.

Say no to Obama's public option and yes to single payer medicare for all.

How it would help!
HR 676 establishes an American-styled national health insurance program. The bill would create a publicly financed, privately delivered health care program that uses the already existing Medicare program by expanding and improving it to all U.S. residents, and all residents living in U.S. territories. The goal of the legislation is to ensure that all Americans, guaranteed by law, will have access to the highest quality and cost effective health care services regardless of ones employment, income, or health care status.
With over 45-75 million uninsured Americans, and another 50 million who are under insured, it is time to change our inefficient and costly fragmented health care system.
Physicians For A National Health Program reports that under a Medicare For All plan, we could save over $286 billion dollars a year in total health care costs.
We would move away from our present system where annual family premiums have increased upwards to $9,068 this year.
Under HR 676, a family of three making $40,000 per year would spend approximately $1600 per year for health care coverage.
Medicare for All would allow the United States to reduce its almost $2 trillion health care expenditure per year while covering all of the uninsured and everybody else for more than they are getting under their current health care plans.
In 2005, without reform, the average employer who offers coverage will contribute $2,600 to health care per employee (for much skimpier benefits).
Under HR 676, the average costs to employers for an employee making $30,000 per year will be reduced to $1,155 per year; less than $100 per month.

http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org...s/united-states-national-health-insurance-act