The big news last week, if you believe it, is that the Affordable Care Act (aka, Obamacare) has reduced the number of Americans who do not have health insurance to only 8.6% of the population.
In other words, if you provide heavily subsidized insurance and tax those who fail to take it, you can reduce the number of uninsured Americans to 8.6%. But, in spite of the penalties and giveaways, the number of uninsured is still high. Even before Massachusetts initiated healthcare reform in 2006 under then-governor Mitt Romney, the uninsured rate in the state was only 7%.
Regardless, all but a small percentage of Americans are now insured, if you believe the estimates of a government agency–the Centers for Disease Control–talking about a government program–the Affordable Care Act (aka, Obamacare). And it’s taken only five years!
As residents of Massachusetts, we can be proud that we’re number one. That is, we have the lowest percentage of uninsured residents in the country (although the stats we found put the number at anywhere from 2.5% to 3.5%).
Well, that’s great … but are Massachusetts rates low because of Obamacare or because of its predecessor, Romneycare? And what has the cost of Obamacare compliance been for Massachusetts residents?
We’re Number One
The Massachusetts Public Health blog announced in 2010 that less that 2% of Massachusetts residents were uninsured, which indicates that since Obamacare took effect, the number of uninsured Massachusetts residents is somewhere between being up a little bit to being nearly double what it used to be.
Let’s assume, though, that the difference is statistically insignificant. At the very least, the stories touting Massachusetts having the lowest rate of uninsured residents in the country shouldn’t be giving the credit to Obamacare, since Massachusetts had the lowest rate of uninsured residents (and the highest premiums) in the country under Romneycare.
So what impact has Obamacare had on Massachusetts?
For one thing, it’s cost us a lot of money. Even though Massachusetts already had achieved the lowest rate of uninsured residents in the country, the state had to scrap that system and start over, because it was not compliant with Obamacare.
To build a portal enabling Massachusetts residents to sign up for health insurance online, Massachusetts hired Canadian firm CGI Group, Inc. It seemed reasonable, perhaps, to assume that if CGI was good enough for the federal government, it should have been good enough for Massachusetts.
You may recall, though, that the federal site malfunctioned. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius described the healthcare.gov site created by CGI as being “like buying an airline ticket using your fax machine.”
The results were remarkably similar in Massachusetts, which was forced to cancel its contract with CGI and choose a new vendor.
When you buy something that doesn’t work, you usually bring it back and receive a full refund. But in Massachusetts, when the state’s new Massachusetts Health Connector website didn’t work, the commonwealth paid the vendor an additional $35 million to cancel its contract. That’s on top of the $17 million the vendor had already been paid.
The FBI and U.S. Attorney for Boston are continuing an investigation of “years of third-rate technological work, disregarded deadlines, pervasive mismanagement, little outcome measurement and general bureaucratic incompetence,” as The Wall Street Journal noted.
With its system showing a 90% failure rate, Massachusetts adopted a transitional Medicaid program that Forbes reported as signing up nearly 300,000 individuals with “almost no integrity checks, due to the virtually nonexistent eligibility verification protocols.” One of many executive directives from President Obama was to delay Obamacare’s income verification requirements and allow individuals to purchase health insurance on an “honor system,” self-reporting their income without any proof.
The 2015 Forbes article noted that the number of residents enrolled in the transitional Medicaid program and in a separate subsidized healthcare program called the CommCare extension “exceeds the state’s highest estimate of those who would be eligible for an exchange tax credit by almost 90,000 enrollees, which suggests fraud.”
Adding up the costs of scraping its Romneycare system and converting to its Obamacare system has cost Massachusetts taxpayers more than $1 billion, according to Forbes estimates.
Other states, of course, are having their own problems with Obamacare. When open enrollment begins in eight weeks, some states will see premium increases exceeding 40%, according to Hot Air.
Noting a Gallup poll saying that a majority of Americans still dislike Obamacare, Hot Air says, “Skyrocketing premiums. Astronomical deductibles that keep people from using their benefits. Doctors who refuse to accept the plans. Insurers trying to escape the exchanges. Hey, what’s not to like about ObamaCare, eh?”
With a majority of the healthcare exchanges created by Obamacare closing down because they’re bleeding money, some are suggesting that America adopt a “single payer” healthcare system, which is a euphemism for socialized healthcare. It was a major part of Bernie Sanders’ platform and it may also be supported by Hillary Clinton.
So, Massachusetts taxpayer, maybe we’ll have a chance to scrap the Massachusetts Health Connector and give healthcare reform a third try. Giving complete control to the federal government–the folks who brought us healthcare.gov–should make all the difference. What could possibly go wrong?