On October 1 I wrote about the leg up that Dell/Perot had as Obamacare forces the roll-out of over 40 IT/help-desk-heavy healthcare insurance exchanges across the United States. This is an opportunity for HP (HPQ)/EDS and IBM as well but Dell/Perot gets the advantage primarily it built and "mans" the exchange here in Massachusetts, called the Commonwealth Connector, that is part of Mitt Romney's signature healthcare insurance reform effort. The 2006 Romneycare legislation is widely considered to be the model for Obamacare (more by Obama than by Romney), which is scheduled to be implemented throughout the United States between now and 2019, primarily in 2014.
Current political crosscurrents here in Massachusetts however are illustrating one of the downsides of that exposure (which, as I also wrote on that October 1 post, is unlike the situation in Utah because Utah is not outsourcing the IT and help-desk work to another state to the extent Massachusetts did). So today we have Texans or people from wherever (if they are Indian as I hypothesized in my earlier post, their accents are great) that "man" the help-desk/phone-bank boiler room trying to defend the fact that individuals, mostly small business people, in Massachusetts cannot buy healthcare insurance at all for the next three months.
And it's apparently not just a matter of not being able to buy it from the Connector. As this Massachusetts Department of Insurance (DOI) web page explains, the problem applies to all insurers and brokers. In Massachusetts that's mostly non-profits but UnitedHealthcare (UNH), Centene (CNC) and other insurers in whom investors would be interested also sell to individuals.
A similar situation occurred in April 2010 when Democratic Governor Deval Patrick turned down rate increase requests by the insurers and froze the market for individuals and small business people trying to get healthcare insurance for two or three months. Patrick is a running for re-election and his effort was demonstrably political grandstanding as subsequent DOI administrative court rulings -- in other words, from his own employees -- said that he both did not have the right to turn down the rate increases and that the increases were actuarially justified.
This time it's the Republicans that are doing the political grandstanding, particularly a Republican named Karyn Polito who is running for State Treasurer and is apparently trying to misdirect news about alleged ethics violations in order to save a foundering campaign. (Believe it or not, and despite what you read about us here in the Bay State, ethics violations might harm her here in Massachusetts.) The story is that the Massachusetts Democrats who passed the law prohibiting individuals and small business people from buying healthcare insurance for three months really didn't mean to. They seem to have adopted the U.S. Congress mentality of passing a law first and then reading it later. They are trying to correct the problem in an omnibus technical-corrections bill but Polito has blocked passage for a week so far in order to get publicity for standing up to the Democrats.
Both situations -- both the one in April and the current brouhaha -- illustrate how unfriendly over-regulated, over-mandated, over-governed Massachusetts is for small businesses. Fortunately you can't beat Cape Cod in the summer or the Berkshires in the autumn.
-- Dennis Byron
(no financial interest in companies mentioned)
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