Massachusetts’s healthcare law, passed in 2006, served as a model for the Affordable Care Act, and the state’s experience during its first year of enrollment offers important lessons for what we can expect over the first six months for the ACA.
- For example, we know that most consumers buy health insurance close to the deadline for enrollment. In Massachusetts, 123 premium paying consumers – or 0.3 percent of the eventual premium paying enrollees – signed up in the first month they could enroll and over 20 percent enrolled in the last month. By the end of a year, 36,000 had purchased coverage. And we know that young adults bought plans. In Massachusetts the number of uninsured young people plummeted from about 1 in 4 to 1 in 10 within 3 years.
- Today, Massachusetts residents have nearly universal health insurance coverage and the primary attacks against this law – many of which we are hearing again today about the ACA – never proved true.
- Before the Massachusetts plan was enacted, people without insurance coverage could only turn to emergency rooms or community health centers for care. The old Massachusetts Uncompensated Care Pool was a program that reimbursed hospitals, community health centers and providers for care that the poor and uninsured couldn't afford, but as the Massachusetts government makes clear, the program "is not health insurance." As then-Governor Romney said in pushing for the Massachusetts reforms, "I believe that we should be able to provide for all of our citizens a basic, good, solid health care system and that means that we don't use the inefficient system we have now where half a million people without insurance go to emergency rooms."
Fonte: White House