This week the Supreme Court has been hearing arguments in a case against the Affordable Care Act. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 16 percent of Americans — around 50 million people — do not have health insurance. If the court upholds the health care law, however, that would change, with nearly all Americans having coverage by 2014. There is one state whose residents already enjoy nearly-universal coverage: Massachusetts. Under legislation signed by then-governor Mitt Romney in 2006, about 98 percent of Massachusetts state residents are insured.
Massachusetts’s health coverage program has been largely seen as a success. Government costs haven't risen dramatically, and a 2011 poll by The Boston Globe showed that 63 percent of residents support the law. Yet despite the successes of Masschusetts’s health care mandate, there are still considerable disparities in coverage among different demographics, according to Renee Landers, professor of law at Suffolk University. Massachusetts resident Silvia Romero also joins the show to share her story about how the state's health care law came to her aid when she lost health care coverage through her employer.
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Comments [4]
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'
Ronald Reagan
The US Constitution is the only thing between individual freedom and the seductive false promise of utopia.
What your hearing in this discussion is an example of the seemingly benign way it departs forever.
Future generations in America and the world will never forgive us if we continue down this path of the state controlling the citizen instead of the citizen controlling the state.
Don't be fooled by it.
Even with the Preamble, the Framers intended the Constitution to provide for the people to be healthy as well as happy and free: "...in Order to form a more perfect Union...promote the general Welfare...do ordain and establish this Constitution..." Isn't health part of a person's welfare? How can we keep saying the Constitution has nothing to do with health care?
Health care a right? Does that mean if there is not a sufficient number of doctors the government can enslave selected individuals and force them to become doctors? How far does Hockenberry envision it would be permissible for his right to intrude into the rights of those who choose to go to medical school. Should we pass a bill forcing doctors to accept medicare/medicade?
"Is this a cultural shift that needs to happen in America"..
So the government is your friend and wants only to provide the patient the right to education except if they require a woman to view an ultrasound before an abortion and other information like a heartbeat and the specific DNA of the unborn child?
"I am reaching out trying to help you"
If the real intention is to scrap the US Constitution or change it beyond recognition than do it formally and honestly with super majority votes in Congress and across the nation and not in dishonest and underhanded ways because essentially that it what is being discussed.
"People do need to have a different attitude about the role of government in this"
And what if people do not agree....than what? Tax penalties or worse?
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