IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Bay State Rationing

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Bay State Rationing

Health Care: Massachusetts' universal medical program is no longer universal. Coverage is being dropped for 30,000 because not enough money is around to pay for everyone. There's a lesson in this for Congress.



Unable to pay the enormous cost of Commonwealth Care, the state's subsidized insurance plan for low-income residents, Massachusetts lawmakers are throwing legal immigrants off the rolls. The state simply does not have enough money to pay its bills, and cuts have to be made somewhere.

Three years ago, Massachusetts enacted a law that required every resident to have medical insurance. Commonwealth Care was created to subsidize those who couldn't afford to buy their own. It didn't take long for the program, which never achieved coverage for everyone, to run into trouble.

Costs soared from $158 million in the first year to $630 million in 2007, then doubled in 2009 to $1.3 billion. Enrollment in the program has also surged. It stands at roughly 181,000, up from 165,000 in the early spring, and is projected to reach 212,000 next year.

With 200,000 still uninsured — most of whom likely would be eligible for the subsidized program — imagine how much more steeply the costs would be rising if the state had met its goal of insuring everyone.

Both Democrats and Republicans hailed Massachusetts' attempt to ensure that everyone had medical insurance coverage. Some on the right even praised the state for taking a market-based approach to the issue.

A few observers, however, correctly noted that such a system cannot possibly be sustained. Demand, they said, will overwhelm it, just as demand has caused medical care rationing in Great Britain and Canada.

Eva Millona, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition, told the New York Times that one possible outcome of the Massachusetts situation is "the message that health care reform cannot be done, period."

Actually, that's the only message, if reform means increasing government's role. That message comes to us from across the Atlantic, from north of our border and now from within our own republic.

What Massachusetts is learning is exactly what Washington will learn if it enacts the public option legislation being debated on Capitol Hill: The taxpayers are not an unending font of dollars; their inability to float costlier statist political schemes will eventually cause deficits.

Do not put faith in promises of care for everyone at lower costs. They are false. Universal care will always increase costs and lead to rationing because it invites system overload. This is the message, and it must be spread before lawmakers do something foolish.