I post here whenever I see some misleading statistics about the healthcare insurance and delivery markets in Massachusetts. But to use the terms misleading and healthcare indexes (or indices) is needless repetition. Indices are by definition misleading.
I was reminded of this when reading this recent article in Insurancenet attributed to Cengage Learning about how Massachusetts fared in a recent index. I think we have pretty good healthcare delivery here in Massachusetts. It's expensive (as is everything else in a cold mostly urban environment) so as a population Massachusetts residents have all long used insurance to help afford it. I don't need an index to help reinforce that, especially one that appears to boost a state's score based on misleading statistics.
In Insurancenet, Cengage, a $2 billion limited partnership, writes:
"Critics of Massachusetts' health reform law, after which the federal reform law was modeled, will be surprised to learn that it actually helped the state move up a notch to No. 2 in the AHR rankings. Massachusetts' steadily declining uninsured rate, now at 5%, is down from the previous year's low of 5.4%. Massachusetts also has a low prevalence of smoking, which dropped to 14.9% in 2010 from 18.5% five years ago, and high rates of immunization, with 93.4% of children 19 months to 35 months old receiving vaccinations."
Cengage makes its $2 billion a year selling to academia so it has clearly picked up the fast-and-loose-with-the-facts bad habits of the academics that are always trying to convince us that the government knows best.
Specifically I am a critic of the Massachusetts "health (insurance) reform" law and I am not at all surprised about the number of people insured in Massachusetts, the low smoking rates and the high childhood immunization rates. That's because none of the above statistics have the least bit to do with the "health (insurance) reform" law known popularly as Romneycare.
- As explained in this recent post, Massachusetts has always had a high percentage of its residents insured and it appears there has been no stastically significant movement in those rates since Romneycare was implemented.
- The reduction in smoking rates in Massachusetts far precedes Romneycare and dates to a concerted education and enforcement effort by local governments in the 1990s, using higher taxes on tobacco products and some settlement money from the tobacco industry. In fact, more recently the state's Democrat legislature took the tobacco taxes intended for use in smoking cessation and spent the money elsewhere, slowing the reduction in smoking rates and drastically cutting enforcement of laws against selling to minors.
- And the idea that the percentage of immunized children from infants to three year olds in Massachusetts has anything to do with Romneycare is just absurd. Those percentages probably predate Romney, never mind Romneycare.
-- Dennis Byron