WASHINGTON - Key players in the debate over how to provide healthcare coverage for the nation's 47 million uninsured say they view Massachusetts' landmark 2006 law as an important model for what Washington could do and how to get it done.
"To those who say these challenges can't be met, I say, 'Look at Massachusetts,' " said Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Healthcare leader
Massachusetts achieved near-universal coverage by investing heavily in patching the holes in the existing system, where most people get coverage through work - something economist Jonathan Gruber of MIT calls "incremental universalism." This centrist approach rejects both the liberal vision of a Canadian-style Medicare-for-all system and the conservative preference to move to a deregulated market where people buy policies on their own with the help of tax credits.
"The architecture of the Massachusetts plan is very similar to the architecture of what everyone is talking about, which is essentially building on the existing system and not throwing it out," said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy group based in Menlo Park, Cal.
With a new administration and Congress gearing up to push a major initiative to expand insurance access for the first time since the Clinton administration's spectacular failure in 1994, Washington policymakers are eager to avoid making the same political mistakes. Massachusetts leaders made sure that people who liked their coverage could keep it, and they built consensus among a web of healthcare interests to create a new safety net for the uninsured.
"What Massachusetts demonstrates is, it can be done," said Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, which represents the views of large corporations on health care. "It's really important because people have talked about what we might do for years and years and years. This shows it can work, and for the most part, it can be highly functional."
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a leader on health care in the Senate who also helped create the state law, cited new figures released yesterday showing that 97.4 percent of Massachusetts residents now have insurance, compared with 90 percent when the law was passed in 2006.
"To those who say these challenges can't be met, I say, 'Look at Massachusetts,' " he said in a statement.
Source:http://www.boston.com/news
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