This blog overcomes the attempts from those on both the left and right of the political spectrum to use statistics to impose needless changes on one of the best healthcare systems in the world.
Massachusetts Health Stats is an as-needed look at statistics about the Massachusetts healthcare delivery and insurance market and industry, including -- occasionally -- aspects of Medicare as they relate to Massachusetts seniors and the Medicare-eligible disabled.
For Medicare-specific information with nationwide implications and some how-to hints for seniors see http://byrondennis.typepad.com/theabcsofmedicare/
After totally screwing up what is arguably1 the most successful Medicare reform ever, the Medicare Part C voucher program signed into law by President Clinton in 1997, by passing a law in 2010 that made massive funding cuts to Part C, the hypocrtical Massachusetts House of Representatives delegation has asked President Obama not to make planned 2014 Part C cuts that Obama says he is required to make by law.
It looks like another case of not reading the legislation before the bozos voted for it. (To be totally accurate, Stephen Lynch didn't vote for the cuts in 2010 and Kennedy wasn't a Congressperson at the time.)
It's kind of ironic that some Democratic group hiding behind corporate and union money is today claiming that over 1,000,000 Massachusetts residents currently between ages 45 and 54 will be forced into a Republican Medicare Voucher Program starting in 2023 when over 200,000 of us current Massachusetts seniors are now very happily saving a lot of money and getting great health care from the 1997 Democratic Medicare Voucher Program (known as Medicare Part C).
I'd like to see my kids (they're actually in the 35-44 age bracket) get the same opportunity to save money and get good healthcare (such as annual physicals, preventive care, help with vision and dental costs, and -- most important -- catastrophic coverage) in 20-30 years that I'm getting today from the 1997 Democratic Medicare Voucher Program. But the Democrats in Washington now want my kids -- AND ME -- all to go back to the old LBJ Medicare with its lack of catastrophic coverage, high co-pays and co-insurance, lack of annual physicals and drug coverage, lack of dental and vision coverage, and other limitations.
Blue Cross Medex Bronze is the most popular single Medicare supplemental insurance product in Massachusetts (although Part C Medicare Advantage products are more popular in aggregate and employer retiree insurance is the most popular approach in Massachusetts for making up for the huge deficiencies in Democratic Party Medicare). But don't feel OK if you are a senior living in Massachusetts and are on Medicare and AARP Medigap, or Medicare and Fallon Medigap, or Medicare and Harvard Medigap. Gruber wants to cheat you out of money too.
I could have spent more time thinking up a better headline. But as a Massachusetts Medicare recipient, a former victim of RomneyCare, and a retired market researcher (not in healthcare), this Harvard guy just pisses me off. This recent article is so off base that it is hard to know where to
begin making corrections or comments. How do people get away with such nonsense?
Some of the mistakes are simply
indicators of sloppy research and writing, others are examples of total failure
to understand Massachusetts’
health care market, and the most critical statements by the author point to
complete intellectual dishonesty. So just taking statements in order presented
by the author as opposed to order of importance, here goes:
"Why was President Obama's major fundraiser and health care insurance advisor, James Roosevelt of the Tufts health insurance non-profit, kicking 5000 Worcester County seniors off the seniors' $45 a month Tufts Medicare Part C health plan and then trying to lure them back to the same plan for $65 a month?"
Clearly Roosevelt got permission from his buddies in Obama's Medicare bureaucracy to pull the switcheroo in a way that Tufts did not have to explain that the change was nothing more than a 40%-plus price increase in a year when most Medicare Part C health plan prices went down. If the price increase had simply been implemented the way annual Medicare Part C plan changes really work, Roosevelt would have had to explain what was really going on.
But still giving up thousands of customers in Worcester County didn't make sense. Now we know "the rest of the story."
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick's administration and the Massachusetts' goo goos ruining the best healthcare system in the world have taken political deceit to a whole new level with the new but still way out of date RomneyCare data released in late January 2013 (see this and other links slugged "Waiting for Obamacare...."). I believe the state's months-long delays (from already very delayed releases of information) in releasing the data and changed formats and missing data points and missing years are all about hiding one fact:
To the extent that you believe that the national Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) mirrors RomneyCare in Massachusetts, PPACA -- also known as Obamacare -- is going to be a disaster.
Even a far left winger like Brian Rosman at Health Care for All has commented on the RomneyCare data delays... but then he gives the state some inexplicable pass for not following its own rules.
The money-grubbing, power-mad shadowy group of Elder Affairs lobbyists in Massachusettshas has filed a bill to increase Medicare premiums in Massachusetts to give more funds to a Democratic-Party/Deval-Patrick political apparatus that misleads Massachusetts' senior citizens about Medicare rules and options.
Specifically this shadowy group of lobbyists is trying to add a surcharge to Medicare-related Medigap, Part C Medicare health plans, and dual-eligible health plans in Massachusetts. Supplemental Medicare insurance -- which is used by almost all senior citizens in Massachusetts who do not receive health insurance from a former employer -- makes up for the incredible shortocmings of Original Democratic-Party Medicare. The proposed legislation seems to be carefully crafted to exempt those on employee-retiree Medicare supplement policies, primarily retired Massachusetts state and municipal government employees.1
The Boston Globe reports February 4 (gated) that the far-left-wing University of Massachusetts program that preaches that "Massachusetts Sucks for Seniors" is shutting down its undergraduate program. Now if only the whole program would go away and stop peddling its totally inaccurate senior-citizen-dependecy creed designed to beef up the coffers of the secretive Massachusetts Elder Affairs lobby (made up of nursing home owners, peddlers of motorized wheel chairs, goo goos in the Orwellian sounding Area Agencies on Aging, and so forth).
One of the self-annointed spokespeople of the far-left Massachusetts Elder Affairs lobby is quoted as saying he rounded up 100 signatures in opposition to closing this one portion of the UMass program on gerontology. Since there are over 1,300,000 seniors in Massachusetts, you would have thought the money-grubbing lobbyist could have rounded up at least 200 signatures.
The conventional wisdom is that the way RomneyCare worked in Massachusetts is a precursor of how well -- or how poorly -- the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) of 2010 as amended, better known as Obamacare, will work for the entire United States. Sorry goo goos and left wing politicians but newly released -- yet already way out-of-date -- state of Massachusetts research shines a harsh light on the likely unintended consequences awaiting the United States of America after the full roll out of PPACA.
The controversy around the Nantucket Cottage Medicare trickery pulled by former Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and discussed on this blog in 2011 is heating up. (I'm writing this hours before his Secretary-of-State confirmation vote but it looks like a sure thing). Here's what looks to be a fair CQ description of the Nantucket Cottage issue, which results in Massachusetts hospitals getting $3 billion more in Medicare reimbursements over the next nine years (we already got $300 million more in 2012) than they otherwise would have (at the expense of all or most other states' hospitals). And here's the one-sided Massachusetts Hospital Association rebuttal.
