Hawaii Abandons “Universal Healthcare”

The final story's going to be a lot more complicated on this, I think, than simply what Gov. Lingle is saying. I'm in Hawaii and my son was covered with this. The program seems to have had some bad management in general. For instance, we signed up for private insurance for my son with the Blue Cross provider in Hawaii, which is HMSA. They were the exclusive administrators of this program. After about 3 months after filling out the forms, we had never gotten a bill from HMSA, so we called to find out what was going on. Turned out HMSA had just automatically moved my son over to the Keiki Care program. HMSA seems to be taking advantage of the program since the government appeared to be ready to write checks. Could problems like this have been solved? Who knows, because after 7 months, the governor cancelled it without ever trying to fix it. Coincidentally, the Hawaii state budget needs cuts right now, so Lingle's looking to cut anything that she can.

The point is: this only shows that a poorly run program with no executive commitment had problems. It's hard to draw any larger conclusion.

A private insurer managing a government insurance program?

Yes, George, that's the way it was arranged. I wasn't following the details when it was created, so I don't know all the arguments, but there was a single private insurer carrying everyone.

GeorgeSorwell,

That is the way Tricare works for the military or Vista for the disable veterans or the insurance benefit for government employees or government retirees? Do you really think that the government has civil servants reviewing claims and actually running programs.

These days, the government does two things, administer contracts and pay contractors.