Via New England Republican, I came across this piece at the San Diego Union-Tribune:
State officials and health care experts say the Massachusetts law has a good chance of achieving [nearly universal coverage] by using both carrots and sticks. It is less clear whether its remedy would work in a state like California where money is scarce and the uninsured make up a larger share of the population.
In addition, Massachusetts might be strapped in a few years when it has to confront perhaps the most intractable health care problem of all: the relentlessly upward spiral of medical costs that every year forces more and more Americans to fend for themselves.
“Clearly, what’s going to have to happen in the long run is more money will have to be injected in the program,” said Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped to write the state’s plan. “We don’t have to in the next year or two, but if you look five or 10 years down the road, if this program is going to continue to exist, it’s going to take more money to keep it going.”
That is, in my opinion, the real problem with the universal health care proposals being discussed in the political arena these days—the idea of getting some reasonable level of health care available to everyone is noble, but most of the plans to do so fail to address the harsh realities of medical cost inflation.
Maybe a program might be affordable now…but if you forecast out beyond your usual short-term budget horizon, a nasty reality likely awaits.