The Boston College Center to Study and Fool Old People1 -- or some such odd name only a Jesuit would love -- has put out a silly report about how RomneyCare helped the self-employed in Massachusetts and incentived thousands of us Massachusetts sixty somethings at the time to run out and start our own business. I was a self-employed person in Massachusetts at the time RomneyCare passed, and believe me the now effectively repealed RomneyCare was the worst thing a self-employed person ever saw.
This flawed Boston College research appears to be political-agenda-driven deception. It says:
“The key components of the (RomneyCare) reform were a state health insurance exchange, an individual mandate, an employer mandate and expansions to Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program.”
Wrong!
The key component of Chapter 58 (since repealed) in the context of the self employed was the Massachusetts merged market and its group of three concept. The Boston College tripe never seem to mentions either.
More important, both the fact that we self employed in Massachusetts had guaranteed issue beginning in 1997 (that is, we self employed people in Massachusetts could “shop for health insurance” long before RomneyCare) and the concept of a group of one since at least 1997 are even more relevant than the merged market or any of the items Boston College's senior-citizen haters identify as “key components” of RomneyCare. Guaranteed issue and group of one had nothing to do with RomneyCare.
In addition Boston College should compare the insurance rate from 1995 to 2012, not rates from the early 2000s to 2012. Its research misses the big drop in the number of people buying individual insurance that occurred because of the guaranteed issue law. Understanding the merged market's effect on fixing that problem2 is the key aspect of RomneyCare to the self-employed. It has nothing to do with all the goo goo stuff that ended up in Obmacare.
1This Boston College group was founded by and possibly is still run by the person that did the research that led directly to the subprime mortagage fiasco and indirectly to the huge government debt in the United States
2It is absurd to use Kaiser for Massachusetts insured rate statistics as Boston College's senior haters do; the numbers are transparently available and always have been directly from the state itself. The state’s own numbers differ from what Boston College report (apparently it used Kaiser intentionally to keep to its political agenda).