The New York Times has an editorial claiming the coercive Massachusetts health care is a rousing success:
Mitt Romney’s defense of the Massachusetts health care reforms was politically self-serving. It was also true.
Despite all of the bashing by conservative commentators and politicians — and the predictions of doom for national health care reform — the program he signed into law as governor has been a success. The real lesson from Massachusetts is that health care reform can work, and the national law should work as well or even better.
There's more:
Residents of Massachusetts have clearly chosen to tune out the national chatter and look at their own experience. Most polls show that the state reforms are strongly supported by the public, business leaders and doctors, often by 60 percent or more.
There are still real problems that need to be solved. Small businesses are complaining that their premiums are rising faster than before, although how much of that is because of the reform law is not clear.
Insuring more people was expected to reduce the use of emergency rooms for routine care but has not done so to any significant degree. There is no evidence to support critics’ claims that the addition of 400,000 people to the insurance rolls is the cause of long waits to see a doctor.
Here's what the NYT owned
Boston Globe says about the Mass. health care law:
A new poll of 838 Massachusetts doctors finds patients are still waiting weeks -- in some cases as long as a month and a half -- for non-urgent appointments with primary care physicians and certain specialists.
Surveyors for the Massachusetts Medical Society called doctors' offices in February and March and asked when they could come in for routine care. They requested a new patient appointment with internists, family practitioners, and pediatricians; an appointment for heartburn with gastroenterologists; a heart check-up with cardiologists; an appointment for knee pain with orthopedic surgeons; and a routine exam with obstetrician/gynecologists.
The average wait ranged from 24 days for an appointment with a pediatrician to 48 days to see an internist.
So, the NYT editorial page doesn't care if you die waiting. We wonder if Jayson Blair wrote that unsigned editorial or maybe the ghost of
Walter Duranty or
Herbert Matthews.
