Massachusetts keeps crowing about its wonderful new healthcare program and how it’s going to insure everybody and be the best thing since, oh, I don’t know, toasted marshmallows.
What it really is is a giveaway to the insurance companies. It forces people to buy insurance instead of buying healthcare. Let’s see, how’s about a $300 monthly premium with a $2,000 deductible sound? Such a bargain! You’re out $5,600 bucks before insurance pays for anything. Wow! What a model plan for the nation.
Anyway, today in a Globe story Alice Dembner writes that the state is cutting by two-thirds a statewide program called CenterCare, which provides “a broad range of health education and support services at community health centers.” Which is to say it helps people understand and control their health problems, focusing on education, prevention, and mitigation, and thus keeping people from reaching the point where their illness requires expensive medical resources. Diabetes is the most obvious example. And the program has been quite successful.
So the state decides to cut funding for this program while it builds an expensive bureaucracy designed to cater to the insurance industry’s perverse ways of denying healthcare to people forced to buy its policies by the state.
How about instead the state either pays directly for healthcare, or builds a consortium of insurance companies that the state, not the doctors, not the patients, deals with? How about people go get healthcare instead of worrying how to pay exorbitant premiums to sociopathic insurance companies?
Oh, yeah, the likely reason the program is getting axed – it’s directed at poor people.
How about healthcare instead of health insurance terror?
