A poll of Massachusetts residents by Harvard’s School of Public Health and the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation found that regular people in Massachusetts are remarkably well informed about the primary reasons their health care is so extremely expensive compared to health care in other industrialized countries. According to the poll regular people [...]

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has released a new report that indicates Gov. Deval Patrick’s goal of controlling health care cost by moving the state towards a global payment method is unlikely to produce real savings.

Another problem for Romney-care. Even with an individual mandate private insurers in Massachusetts costs to consumers rise faster than public plans. How much more evidence do we need that single payer health care is the only affordable way to go?

The Boston Globe the have an interesting piece about how Massachusetts’ health care reform law came into being and the role Mitt Romney played in assure it’s passage. It is well worth a read. The article shows what a prominent role Romney played personally in making sure a individual mandate was part of the final legislation and why it would be impossible for him now to fully renounce the one in the Massachusetts’ law he signed. From the Boston Globe:

Romney’s grasp of the subject was “unbelievably impressive,’’ he said, and the governor warmed to the game-changing potential of the individual mandate. Romney’s political advisers, however, “were not that keen on it,’’ [Jonathan] Gruber said.

To them, the political hazards spoke louder than the policy-making opportunity.

The key players in the Massachusetts debate know what a critical champion Romney was of the individual mandate; so a total flip flop on the issue would be too deeply cynical as to be politically unfeasible

The article again made it clear how many of the most important components of the Massachusetts law, which also eventually made it into the Affordable Care Act, were only a few years ago seen as deep conservative policies advanced by right wing think tanks.

Massachusetts is still struggling with controlling health care costs since it decided to embrace health care reform by just expanding our broken private insurance system to cover more people. A problem in Massachusetts, which is common around the country, is that there are huge variances in what is paid for the same procedure. From the [...]

Given the incredible structural similarity between the Massachusetts health care reform law signed by Mitt Romney and the new national Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama, the release of the annual physician workforce survey (PDF) from the Massachusetts Medical Society has generated a lot of attention. But I would caution everyone involved that on [...]

Thomas Ferguson is a professor of politics and economics at University of Massachusetts at Boston. The author of the “Investment Theory of Party Competition,” he believes that business elites, not voters, are the dominant force in political systems. Together with Joi Chen, he has released an analysis of the Brown/Coakley election, and concludes that the [...]

Want to see into the future? Look at the ongoing fight over premium increases for policies on the Massachusetts Connector (exchange), and the effort by the state regulator to control prices, and you’ll get a glimpse–because the health care plan just put into law would effectively replicate the Massachusetts health care system in every state. [...]

In Massachusetts, which has previously implemented a health care system very similar to the one that will be created by the new health care law, their exchange is in a serious fight with the private health insurance companies over premium increases. The state division of insurance recently rejected the vast majority of rate increases proposed [...]

Let me put this as simply as possible. Democrats control everything in Washington right now. They control the White House. They have a huge margins in the House and in the Senate. Democrats have larger margins in both chambers than any party has had for decades. They have zero excuses for failing to deliver. Americans [...]