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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (745425)

10/10/2013 10:53:17 AM

From: Bill

Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 1580089

Study: RomneyCare Killed 18,000 Massachusetts Jobs

Written by Thomas R. Eddlem
Monday, 19 September 2011 09:22

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's highly touted RomneyCare has cost Massachusetts some 18,000 jobs, reduced investment in the state by tens of millions, raised health care costs, and lowered per capita disposable income, according to a computer model study by the Suffolk University-based Beacon Hill Institute. RomneyCare became the model for Obama's national health care reform legislation Congress passed in 2010, including an individual mandate, tax penalties for companies that don't offer care, a health insurance exchange, and several other similar key components.

The health care law "does not exist in a vacuum," Beacon Hill Institute executive director David Tuerck wrote in a September 15 press release unveiling the computer modeling study. "The 'shared sacrifice' needed to provide universal health care includes a net loss of jobs, which is attributable to the higher costs that the measure imposed."

The study concluded that the Massachusetts health care reform (HCR) signed by Mitt Romney in 2006 has:

driven total health insurance costs up by [between] $3 billion and $6.1 billion;caused Massachusetts to employ between 15,551 and 21,422 fewer people;slowed the growth of disposable income per capita by $376; andreduced investment in Massachusetts by between $21.28 million and $29.33 million.Mitt

Romney's presidential campaign continues to defend the Massachusetts model, questioning the study's statistics. "This study is deeply flawed. It is based on the assumption that Massachusetts’ health-care reform caused the rate of health-care cost increases to accelerate. In fact, health-care cost increases have slowed since the passage of reform. This error, therefore, invalidates the study," Romney spokesman Ryan Williams told the Boston Herald September 16. However, though Massachusetts' health care costs — already the highest in the nation in 2006 — have grown at a slower rate than before RomneyCare was adopted, they have nevertheless remained the highest in the nation. Beacon Hill Institute officials criticized the Romney campaign's analysis and defended their own model as a far more comprehensive analysis of cost trends in health care. “Our report is accurate,” the Institute's research director Paul Bachman replied.

Indeed, the Beacon Hill Institute study admittedly underestimated the job loss. It did not account for all the job loss of RomneyCare, because much of the cost in jobs is being felt by other states which have had to subsidize the Massachusetts program with federal tax dollars. "Some of these cost increases do not directly affect the Massachusetts economy, for example most of the federal Medicaid and Medicare dollars spent in the state derive from the rest of the country. Therefore, we consider only the cost to the state government and private firms and employees and exclude increase costs of Medicare and the federal portion of Medicaid." In short, federal subsidies for Medicare and Medicaid have kept RomneyCare afloat in Massachusetts, and prevented even worse job losses.

The Beacon Hill Institute concluded of the cost increases RomneyCare imposed on businesses,

Some firms react first by cutting back on production and then by cutting payrolls. Others relocate to lower cost (out-of-state) production sites. And yet others, no longer able to compete, simply shut their doors. The higher cost of employing people comes at the expense of profit margins and decreasing overall the competitiveness of Massachusetts businesses. We estimate that the amount investment in Massachusetts that did not take place as a result of HCR was between $21.28 million and $29.32 million in 2010.

The job-killing impact of RomneyCare on Massachusetts leaves questions about what impact ObamaCare will have on jobs in the nation. The Beacon Hill Institute study stressed that "the effects of state level and national level HCR policies might differ." But considering that Massachusetts lost 18,000 jobs and the state represents less than two percent of the U.S. population, extrapolation of RomneyCare to the nation as a whole means the loss of one million jobs or more. The Beacon Hill Institute explains the economic impact:

When states or the national government adopt policies that raise costs, local employers are put at a disadvantage and many opt to relocate to other jurisdictions. For firms with a global focus that might mean moving operations out of the country.

The Boston Herald'sHolly Robichaud concluded on September 19,

Mitt will be held accountable for our state having the highest insurance premiums in the country along with it being an unsustainable budget buster. Right now, we are surviving on an influx of federal dollars to make it work.

thenewamerican.com

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (745425)	10/10/2013 10:54:35 AM
From: Bill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580089

Emergency room visits grow in Mass. New insurance law did not reduce number of users By Liz Kowalczyk, Boston Globe Staff \| July 4, 2010 The number of people visiting hospital emergency rooms has climbed in Massachusetts, despite the enactment of nearly universal health insurance that some hoped would reduce expensive emergency department use. According to state data released last week, emergency room visits rose by 9 percent from 2004 to 2008, to about 3 million visits a year. When the Legislature passed the insurance law in 2006, officials hoped it would increase access to primary care doctors for the uninsured, which would improve their health and lessen their reliance on emergency rooms for the flu, sprains, and other urgent care. Residents began enrolling in state-subsidized insurance plans in October 2006; everyone was required to have coverage by July 1, 2007. But, according to a report from the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy, expanded coverage may have contributed to the rise in emergency room visits, as newly insured residents entered the health care system and could not find a primary care doctor or get a last-minute appointment with their physician. David Morales, commissioner of the division, said several national and statewide studies have shown that expanding insurance coverage does not reduce emergency room visits. This is because the uninsured “are not really responsible for significant ER use’’ he said. The growth in emergency room use predates the health insurance law and mirrors national trends, according to Nancy Turnbull, a senior lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health. “I don’t think the increase has anything to do with health care reform,’’ she said. “It’s much more reflective of [primary care] access problems.’’ Sarah Iselin, president of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation and a former commissioner of the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy, said that even before the state enacted universal health insurance, the uninsured made up only about 10 percent of the state’s population. As a result, she said, “you’d have to see an enormous decrease in their ER use’’ to affect the overall trend. “ER use has been going up every single year for time eternal,’’ she said. The state report found that the number of emergency room visits climbed at about the same rate in community hospitals and teaching hospitals. But, the report found, the growth in emergency room use varied widely across the state, for reasons unknown. Emergency room visits at hospitals in Western Massachusetts soared 20 percent over the four-year period, but grew by just 3 percent at hospitals in the northeastern part of the state. The state said the growing use of emergency rooms has significant cost implications, because private insurers and government programs pay substantially more for a visit to the emergency room than for a doctor’s appointment. Morales said the state needs “to change our payment system to encourage the use of primary care.’’ Better payment for primary care physicians would encourage more doctors to enter the field, he said. Andrew Dreyfus, executive vice president for health care services at Blue Cross, said changing how doctors are paid could create incentives for them to expand office hours and keep patients out of emergency rooms. Global payments, for example, in which doctors are paid a fixed annual fee intended to cover all of a patient’s care, discourage use of unnecessarily expensive care, he said. Blue Cross, the state’s largest insurer, has seen a slight decrease in emergency room use among its members over the past year, Dreyfus said. He said that trend could be related to growing use of limited-service clinics, such as CVS MinuteClinics. boston.com Liz Kowalczyk can be reached at kowalczyk@globe.com.