LRC: Universal Health Mess in Massachusetts

Universal Health Mess in Massachusetts

by Michael S. Rozeff

Insanity in health-care legislation

As if to prove that its state’s democracy is just as authoritarian as New York’s or Minnesota’s, the Massachusetts legislature has passed a health care bill that establishes a democratic dictatorship over health care. Democrats, Republicans, and the Republican governor, Mitt Romney, alike support the bill. Bi-partisanship signals that the legislation achieves a new bear market low in the replacement of free markets for health care with health care by government fiat.

Governor Romney will sign the bill (or most of it). He pushed for it. He contributed to it. He called it "exactly what we’d hoped for." What he hoped for is a vile and morally reprehensible piece of legislation. As a rule, is legislation ever anything else?

House Act No. 4850 begins with a preamble that an "emergency law" is "necessary for the immediate preservation of the public health and convenience." This is a lie. The same sentence says that the "purpose" is not an emergency but to "expand access to health care...increase the affordability of health care products, and enhance accountability of our state’s health system..." This is a second lie. Funneling health care through new state bureaucracies will diminish access, raise costs, and make health care less responsive and accountable to its customers...