But is it replicable? That's been the question bounding around governors' mansions, state legislatures and national media for the past few weeks. This week, it was taken up by the Cato Institute, a libertarian DC-based think tank.
In a hearing room in the stately Rayburn Building, a marbeled office building that is part of the U.S. Congress, a panel of four speakers--two Cato Institute stalwarts and two from the more pro-government side--talked about the remarkableness of the politics of the Massachusetts bill.
Its key components are also remarkable: a government subsidy to defray the cost of health insurance for anyone with an income below 300 percent of poverty; a mandate that individuals buy an affordable insurance plan; and a government-backed agency that will help craft affordable coverage that meets Massachusetts' mandates on coverage.
What Ron Pollack of Families USA saw as a strong plan that could be replicated ("not necessarily lock, stock and barrel" but certainly "some key elements may well be adopted"), Cato's Arnold Kling* Michael Tanner viewed as "the road to hell paved with good intentions." Massachusetts, he said, "has gotten it all wrong." He called the individual mandate "unprecedented" and an "infringement on individual liberty." Special interests, he allowed, would lard up the insurance benefit mandates with so many additional things that the plans will become too expensive. Moreover, the existence of publicly backed plans will cause businesses to "dump their employees" into them and abandon the current system.
It seemed, though, that his real bottom line was that the Massachusetts plan's subsidies reach so far into the middle class that the plan "will increase the number of people dependent on government" and that will lead to a growing "constituency to vote for more government."
Well! There's the downside of responding to what has become an urgent need throughout the country.
For more on the perdition we face if the Massachusetts approach spreads (and why this program could be the best model we have), an archived webcast of this event is at HealthCast.
*Sorry, it wasn't Arnold Kling; it was Cato's Michael Tanner who was speaking.
