Massachusetts Faces Costs of Big Health Care Plan

More insanity. This is AIG for the FAT. (more about this later)

At Fitness Watch I try to avoid most politics except the politics of fitness. Here there is an intersection between the politics of fitness and health upon which I will comment.

You should realize that the Massachusetts plan is touted as an example for the country as a whole and that there are far-reaching consequences to this.

"Three years ago, Massachusetts enacted perhaps the boldest state health care experiment in American history, bringing near-universal coverage to the commonwealth with Paul Revere speed.

To make it happen, Democratic lawmakers and Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, made an expedient choice, deferring until another day any serious effort to control the state’s runaway health costs.

The day of reckoning has arrived. Threatened first by rapid early enrollment in its new subsidized insurance program and now by a withering economy, the state’s pioneering overhaul has entered a second, more challenging phase.

Thanks to new taxes and fees imposed last year, the health plan’s jittery finances have stabilized for the moment. But government and industry officials agree that the plan will not be sustainable over the next 5 to 10 years if they do not take significant steps to arrest the growth of health spending.

With Washington watching, the state’s leaders are again blazing new trails. Both Gov. Deval Patrick, Mr. Romney’s Democratic successor, and a high-level state commission have set out to revamp the way public and private insurers reimburse physicians and hospitals.

They want a new payment method that rewards prevention and the effective control of chronic disease, instead of the current system, which pays according to the quantity of care provided."

As with other stupidity-based schemes this has no hope of working.

It is impossible for docs to prevent disease, except those caused by medical error.

Disease prevention can only be accomplished by the individual him- or her-self.

And the only way of which we are aware to lessen the likelihood of developing certain bad illnesses is to get fitter.

Any other approach must, will and does fail.

That is the underlying fallacy to all of this nonsense.

And the sooner the profoundly stupid people in DC realize this, the better off we will become.

The onus should not be on the docs or the system for the failure of people to do what it takes to protect their health, just as it should not be on teachers to ensure that school kids do well in school - that is the responsibility of parents who ought to get their kids to study, behave, etc.

Punishing docs (and teachers) for the failures of adults to act on their own behalf (and on behalf of their children) will have no outcome other than maintaining the status quo, which is the deepening of an existing problem, only more expensively.

The issue is one of horses at water. You cannot make them drink.

But you can prod them by making the adults/parents accountable by eliminating rescue benefits.

Once they have a chance to experience the full scope of what they have voluntarily done to themselves, then change is more likely.

Anything else will definitely never work.

(As to the AIG-ity of this densely stupid fat person bailout project - a redundancy and common element to all health care reform - consider virtually any non-cheerleading piece written about the AIG bailout. Just substitute "fat people" for "AIG" and you will soon get the point. See here to get an idea. BTW, this is not an endorsement of the linked website, the author or their politics.)