[TheMercenary]

And there you have it. The microcosm of plans at reform is failing.

Three years after Massachusetts enacted its sweeping health-reform legislation, rising health costs continue to bedevil the state and threaten to derail reform efforts.

Despite a significant restructuring of the state's health sector and dominance of nonprofit health plans, Massachusetts still has the highest health-insurance costs in the nation, averaging $13,788 for a family, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

One of the reasons so many people supported the reform effort in Massachusetts is that they were told universal coverage would lead to lower costs. With universal coverage, Massachusetts politicians argued, as many in Washington do today, people would no longer have to pay the medical bills of those who don't have insurance—the "free riders"—and therefore health-insurance premiums would fall, or at least level off.

Ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who led the reform effort, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal (April 11, 2006) at the time the law was adopted, saying: "Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced."

An Opposing Viewpoint
A Great Success: The facts tell the story of Massachusetts' remarkably successful health-reform law But such a reduction is proving much more difficult to achieve. Indeed, the state's major insurers plan to increase premiums by 7% to 12% next year, with small businesses facing the largest increases.

In fact, those premiums may be going up because more people are in plans that pay doctors and hospitals at lower, government rates, causing a shift in costs to private insurance payers. The Seattle-based actuarial firm Milliman Inc. estimates that the average U.S. family in a private plan pays an additional $1,788 a year to compensate for lower payments by public plans, representing a hidden tax on private insurance.

The nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change, in Washington, D.C., conducted a 2008 study of the Massachusetts reforms that included interviews with representatives of employer groups, benefits consultants, health plans, health-care providers and policy makers. Many of these parties said they were concerned that unless the costs of health care in the state were brought under control, "the current trajectory of the reform is financially unsustainable."

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...530315578.html