Himmelstein and Woolhandler Respond to Massachusetts' New Healthcare Law
The New York Times
Published: April 9, 2006
To the Editor:
Your reports about Massachusetts’ health reform legislation treat politicians’ overblown claims as gospel.
The legislation completely ignores one-third of the uninsured, dismissing the Census Bureau’s estimate that 748,000 lack coverage in Massachusetts in favor of an estimate of 500,000 derived from a phone survey.
The linchpin of the promised coverage is a requirement that most of the uninsured buy their own coverage, and assurances that private insurers will offer affordable, comprehensive policies.
But already reports have surfaced that these new policies will be far costlier than promised, putting them out of reach of most of the uninsured and sharply raising the costs of state subsidies to help the very poor.
Predictably, rising costs will force more employers to drop coverage, while state coffers will be drained by the continuing cost increases in Medicaid. When the next recession hits, tax revenues will fall just as a flood of newly unemployed people join the Medicaid program or apply for the insurance subsidies promised in the reform legislation.
The program is simply not sustainable over the long or even short term. In contrast, a single-payer reform could save $9 billion a year on bureaucracy in Massachusetts, more than enough to cover the uninsured and to upgrade coverage for the rest of us.
David U. Himmelstein, M.D.
Steffie Woolhandler, M.D.
Cambridge, Mass., April 6, 2006
The writers, associate professors of medicine at Harvard, co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program.