Turns out Wikipedia has a pretty good entry on Massachusetts Health Care Reform (of course). In particular, the Outcomes section has some good numbers.

There is a “safety net” that is supposed to help low income residence pay their out-of-pocket expenses. To do that, it reimburses the providers for copays, deductibles, etc. Apparently, the payouts from the state have gone down recently. That’s probably part of the larger budget shortfall, but it points to a bigger problem with the system paying for itself (which it certainly isnt).

All in all, I’m glad that Massachusetts tried something. But I’m not sure it’s a good model for the rest of the country. And I certainly don’t think we have enough data to make a judgement yet.

At our annual 4th of July gathering, the topic of healthcare reform came up and I was asked about the state of the Massachusetts health insurance initiative. Since the national healthcare plan is looking a lot like ours - individual mandate, subsidized plans for lower-income families, tax on small businesses who don’t offer insurance (though that one was removed from by Romney) - it seemed like I should dig up some info on that. So here are a few quick facts and links to recent Boston Globe articles on the subject.

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I’m still not done with this claim. I gave up after a couple of hours. I imagine I’ll be spending a good chunk of my weekend on this.I am currently trying to submit a claim for out-of-network services to my health insurance. I’ve done this before with my old insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and I thought that process was abstruse, but it wasn’t too odious and it got done to my satisfaction. Well, my company recently changed insurers and I now realize how spoiled I was. I would just like to take a moment to talk about the claim form I am faced with and what it demonstrates about the unfathomable levels of stupidity that humans are capable of.

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