Scott Brown Still ? The Craptacular Massachusetts Health Care Plan He Voted For As State Senator
Here's Tea Party dreamboat and new Bay State Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) yapping it up about the super-expensive health care plan put into place when Mitt Romney bestrode Boston like a god:
"What we have here is a free-market enterprise where we're providing insurance on various levels to people in Massachusetts," Brown said. "The plans in Washington are a one-size-fits-all plan that's going to cost almost $1 trillion-plus and raise taxes at a time when we don't need it."
There's at least a few problems with the Massachusetts plan, which has nothin' to do with free markets and which Brown voted for as a state senator. It's given his home state the highest health-insurance premiums in the country. It's somehow managed to reduce the number of people covered, from 2.6 percent when the law went into effect to around 5.5 percent in 2008. And it's genuinely unpopular among the poor schmoes who are most affected by it. Explains Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review:
[In a story talking up the Massachusetts plan, The Washington Post] cited a Boston Globe poll showing that 59 percent of state voters supported the law. The paper acknowledged that 69 percent had supported the law last year, but found a silver lining—only 11 percent of those polled wanted the law repealed. "Divining voters' motivation is difficult," the Post concluded.
What the Post didn't report was that this year's poll did not ask people who were directly affected by the law whether they supported it. A year ago, Harvard pollster Robert Blendon and his colleagues asked that question, and found that only 37 percent of residents in that group supported the law while 56 percent opposed it.