The subsidized insurance program at the heart of the state’s healthcare initiative is expected to roughly double in size and expense over the next three years - an unexpected level of growth that could cost state taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars or force the state to scale back its ambitions.
State projections obtained by the Globe show the program reaching 342,000 people and $1.35 billion in annual expenses by June 2011. Those figures would far outstrip the original plans for the Commonwealth Care program, largely because state officials underestimated the number of uninsured residents.
The state has asked the federal government to shoulder roughly half of the program’s cost from 2009 through 2011, but there is no guarantee of that funding. Commonwealth Care provides free or subsidized insurance for low- and moderate-income residents.
“The state alone cannot support that kind of spending increase,” said Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a business-funded budget watchdog group.
It would have been nice if state legislators, not to mention Governor Romeny who was instrumental in getting this bureaucratic atrocity passed, had realized that they couldn’t afford it before they saddled the taxpayers of Massachusetts with it. But I suspect that the liberals who want socialized medicine are more concerned with making it law, so that it will never go away, than they are with figuring out how to actually pay for it.
What’s interesting is that the state is now asking federal taxpayers to foot some of this bill, which is absurd for two reasons: 1) Why should people in the rest of the country pay for health in Massachusetts? 2) If if Massachusetts can’t provide enough revenue to provide universal health care for everyone, why in the world would we think that we could do it on a national level without resorting to the rationing of medical services?
The beauty of our federalist system is that we citizens who live in the rest of the country can evaluate what’s happening in Massachusetts and learn from it. The problem is, how many of us - including our political leaders - will learn from it?