Health Care Danger Signs in Massachusetts

During the contentious health care debate in Congress, Democratic leaders frequently pointed to Massachusetts as a model for the kind of reforms they were enacting.  If vastly expanded access could be achieved without an corresponding increase in costs in Massachusetts, Democratic leaders hoped to be able to lend credence to the contrived claims of deficit reductions that they had extracted from the Congressional Budget Office.

But like everything else in the case in favor of health care reform, the fairy tale is collapsing under the weight of reality in Massachusetts.  Where Democrats promised cost reductions, we are instead seeing rapid cost increases.  Where Democrats promised increased access, we are instead seeing longer lines at fewer facilities.  And where no less than President Obama himself proclaimed that those who liked their current health care would be allowed to keep it, we are instead seeing rapid moves towards abolishing private health plans entirely and the imposition of a system where practice outside the reach of government mandates is banned.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that much, perhaps even most, of the claims in favor of the Democrats’ health care reform package were just plain false.  The cost reduction claims were obtained from the CBO by requiring the CBO to use assumptions that counted 10 years of increased revenue and only 4 years of program costs, a bald case of budgetary flim-flam artistry even by the loose standards of Washington, D.C.  Claims of ability to keep existing plans unchanged were supported by nothing other than hope that companies would not notice that the new program made it cheaper for them to drop coverage and let the taxpayers take over.  (When several companies started to run the numbers on exactly that scenario in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, California Democrat Henry Waxman tried to haul them up for a public flogging until he realized that doing so would expose the Democrats’ scam for what it was.  Waxman’s plans for hearings were hastily dropped.)  And all this has become apparently only a few months into the very preliminary stages of program implementation.

Yet, as the Journal notes, the whole slimy process may have been the plan from the beginning:

“If you’re going to do health-care cost containment, it has to be stealth,” said Jon Kingsdale, speaking at a conference sponsored by the New Republic magazine last October. “It has to be unsuspected by any of the key players to actually have an effect.” Mr. Kingsdale is the former director of the Massachusetts “connector,” the beta version of ObamaCare’s insurance “exchanges,” and is now widely expected to serve as an ObamaCare regulator.

He went on to explain that universal coverage was “fundamentally a political strategy question”—a way of finding a “significant systematic way of pushing back on the health-care system and saying, ‘No, you have to do with less.’ And that’s the challenge, how to do it. It’s like we’re waiting for a chain reaction but there’s no catalyst, there’s nothing to start it.”

In other words, health reform was a classic bait and switch: Sell a virtually unrepealable entitlement on utterly unrealistic premises and then the political class will eventually be forced to control spending.

At a minimum, this is something important to keep in mind in the upcoming election season, when Democrats will certainly return to their familiar themes of how Republicans cannot be trusted and how only Democrats care about “the little guy”.