In a recent blog post CBS’ Wyatt Andrews gushed about Massachusetts’ new health care plan that requires people to purchase health care. His take:
“This isn't Clinton care;” Andrews assured his audience, “it's a huge experiment to see whether the private market can work when everyone's forced to be in it.”
Problem: it’s not a free private market if the government is forcing people to be in it.
Andrews extolled “what's great about the plan,” admitting that the “not great” aspects include the fact that “Thousands of employers complain they can't afford to do (offer insurance) what the law orders them to do.”
But still, he said, “What this is though, is a great start--not to mention a big time election issue.”
A big-time election issue indeed – which is why unbiased media coverage will be important.
Andrews might have mentioned that Republican Mitt Romney, who installed the Massachusetts plan, has been distancing himself from its details in his presidential campaign.
“Mr. Romney often promotes his health care bill in Massachusetts on the campaign trail, holding it up as a private-market-based solution to the problem of the uninsured, as opposed to ‘socialized medicine,’ or ‘Hillary-care,’ as he often says. But he almost never mentions the requirement that individuals buy coverage,” reported The New York Times August 24.
Andrews described his trip to Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, and how “sitting directly behind one of the dozens of beer stands” was a kiosk promoting the new plan. Andrews explained it like this:
“…the state people know what they are doing. They know who they are missing in the program. They are missing young men, perhaps up to 130 thousand of them--most of whom are Red Sox fans.”
Was this out of concern for possibly uninsured baseball fans? Well … Andrews said one of Massachusetts’ problems was that “They haven't persuaded all those young men, men who don’t need or want insurance, that this is a good enough deal. And they badly need these guys paying into the system.”
As the Business & Media Institute has found, the number of uninsured Americans is a heavily inflated statistic used by politicians and the media, and millions of those uninsured may have made a personal choice not to buy.
There are 8.3 million uninsured people who make between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and 8.74 million who make more than $75,000 a year. That’s roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to afford health insurance because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326.
Add to all of this the fact that 45 percent of those who are uninsured at any given time are going to get insurance within four months, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
