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The bus is full
Massachusetts took a stab at universal care by requiring every resident to buy health insurance, with the state subsidizing the premiums. The annual cost of Commonwealth Care, originally pegged at $245 million, will be $1.3 billion this year. Consequently, the state's health-care costs have spiked 42 percent in three years, and today, health- care spending is 33 percent above the national average.Now The Boston Globe reports that even though Massachusetts has more doctors per capita than any state, waiting periods to see medical specialists for routine care have grown, again because of Commonwealth Care. The average wait for a specialist now is 50 days; for a family doctor, it's 63, while the average woman who thinks she's pregnant doesn't get to see an obstetrician-gynecologist until her second trimester. But for the busiest physicians, the wait can be as much as a year, simply because narcissistic socialist politicians fancied themselves better qualified to run the state's heath-care system than people with many years of training and experience. And despite the enormous effort and expense, Massachusetts still has failed to achieve universal coverage. The longer waits, of course, are the consequence of hundreds of thousands of newly insured residents descending on the health-care system. As Dr. Gene Lindsey, president of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates of Boston describes it: "We had a bus that was pretty full, and then we invited more people on the bus. Now people are standing in the aisles." For 50, 63, sometimes 365 days. More ominously, the independent consultants whose recent report quantified the longer waits said the development "may signal what could happen nationally in the event that access to health care is expanded" via Obamacare. Posted by: Fred 2009-05-27 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=270581 |