A few excerpts:
As a health care plan, Romneycare is an unmitigated fiasco. It has caused costs to skyrocket, insurance premiums to soar and nonprofit providers like Blue Cross to suffer hundreds of millions of dollars in losses...(Read the full text of "Romneycare a Big Bust".)
Taxpayers now spend $2.5 billion more on our state’s health care budget. The direct cost of Romneycare has gone from less than $100 million a year to at least $400 million -- and even that number is suspect...
If you want to know why Romneycare's costs keep rising, check out this simple statistic from the Patrick administration: In 2006, 85 percent of the insured in Massachusetts got their coverage through private group coverage at work. Today that’s down to 79 percent.
Meanwhile the percentage on the MassHealth dole has doubled, and more than 150,000 people are now subsidized through Commonwealth Care.
Romneycare supporters like Brandeis University health policy professor Stuart Altman brag that "the basic reason for the reform was to extend coverage, and on this, we have done amazingly well." But that's only if you use the phrase "extend coverage" to mean "the government forced you to buy your own insurance."
Romneycare hasn’t made that insurance more affordable -- just the opposite. Many people have seen their premiums double in the past five years. Supporters also never mention that when Romneycare was signed, Massachusetts already had one of the nation's lowest rates of uninsured...
Why would we ever want to adopt this failed scheme at the national level?
(Via Dr. Matthew Bowdish and Instapundit.)
