Massachusetts Makes Strides in Expanding Health-Insurance Coverage

I have to give a gold star to my home state this week. Massachusetts just announced an impressive increase in the number of residents with health insurance. Since the June 2006 launch of a program aimed to extend health-care coverage to every resident, more than 400,000 people have joined the ranks of the insured. You can read about the ongoing health-care reform efforts at the official state site or in the Wall Street Journal’s health blog.

There is continuing debate about how the financial side of this will work out, and it’s clear that everyone is watching Massachusetts to see how this experiment goes. One fact stood out to me in the reports though: The Boston Globe says that visits by the uninsured to community health centers and hospitals dropped by 37% from July 2007 to September 2007 compared with the same time period the year before.

I’ve written before about how awful it is to be in an emergency room. A great deal of the crowding and long wait times in the ER is due to uninsured people using it for impromptu primary care. When you make an appointment with a regular doctor for anything from a routine checkup to major surgery, one of the first questions the receptionist asks is, “What kind of insurance do you have?”

Emergency-room personnel ask, too, but they are required to provide care, even if patients don’t have insurance; that’s due in part to a government regulation designed to protect people without insurance from being turned away during a medical catastrophe. ERs are required to provide care, so they often fill up quickly with nonurgent problems. Or people without insurance may wait until their nonurgent problems become inescapable (occasional chest pain, for instance, might be ignored until a serious heart attack occurs), and then need the immediate care provided by an ER.

If Massachusetts-style health coverage can increase the use of preventive medical care and decrease the inappropriate or overly delayed use of ER services, we in the Bay State will have a model for other states—and possibly the nation—to follow.

(PHOTO: FOTOLIA/HEALTH)

 
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