CBS Evening News and Katie Couric covered MA health reform in a report on Friday. Nothing new here, just the national attention, for good and bad. The piece was done weeks ago; they held it until they had a good news peg: Romney’s health plan announcement. You can read the script and see the video here.
Better though is the reporter Wyatt Andrews’ blog, commenting on the incongruity of seeing the Connector booth at Fenway. Andrews sums up the situation quite well:
Here’s what’s great about the plan.
1) They are really trying to be universal. More on this in a second.
2) If you can pay, you can’t be turned down.
3) They have reached 170 thousand people who had no insurance last year. And that’s just so far.
4) They have jump started the national debate over how to get this intractable problem, the plight of the uninsured, solved. This isn’t Clinton care; it’s a huge experiment to see whether the private market can work when everyone’s forced to be in it.
Here’s what’s not great, all of which the state admits it’s working on.
1) Thousands of employers complain they can’t afford to do (offer insurance) what the law orders them to do.
2) Tens of thousands of the working poor–or part timers–can’t afford the cheapest plan offered through work.
3) Tens of thousands of middle income folks can’t afford $662 dollars a month, especially when that policy has a huge deductible too.
4) They haven’t persuaded all those young men, men who don’t need or want insurance, that this is a good enough deal. And they badly need these guys paying into the system.
Andrews ends: “And you have to hand it to Massachusetts. It was hilarious to watch that stream of raving Red Sox fans juggling cheese dogs, tankers of beer– and flyers for health insurance. I am not commenting on the total lack of irony there: I was just jealous.”
