On January 10, Representative Frank Hynes and Senator Steve Tolman will refile the Massachusetts Health Care Trust (S.755), which would bring single payer health care - first rate health coverage for all residents - to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Click here to see a fact sheet on the Massachusetts Health Care Trust.
Click here to see the full text of the Massachusetts Health Care Trust.

Call your legislator TODAY to ask them to cosponsor the bill that will bring universal, comprehensive health care to everyone!

Contact the Mass-Care offices if you would like help in finding out who your legislators are, or would like advice on talking with your legislators about single payer: we are at info@masscare.org or 617-723-7001.

Let’s build the number of co-sponsors before January 10!

Changes in Financial Burdens for Health Care: National Estimates for the Population Younger Than 65 Years, 1996 to 2003
Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) 2006;296:2712-2719.
December 13, 2006

Jessica S. Banthin, PhD; Didem M. Bernard, PhD

Context: Policymakers as well as physicians need to understand how rapidly rising health care costs are affecting specific groups of patients.

Objective: To estimate the number and characteristics of individuals in the United States faced with very high financial burdens for health care. (more…)

UHCEF Article of Interest

=====================================================
Steve Bailey
The Boston Globe (click here for link to original article)
6 December 2006

To appreciate what is happening to healthcare costs, consider this amazing number: $2,228,099.

That is what it will cost the City of Boston, on average, for health insurance alone for a single employee, say a cop or a teacher, over a lifetime, according to Segal Co., the city’s actuarial consultant. That is $2.2 million per employee on a city payroll that currently has 16,400 employees and another 12,600 retirees and their dependents. (more…)

Canadian Institute for Health Information
December 5, 2006
Health care spending to reach $148 billion this year

The public and private shares of total health care spending have
remained fairly steady over the past decade. This year, the public
share is expected to account for 70.3% of total health care spending,
in line with the 70/30 ratio of public/private spending seen over the
last ten years. (more…)

UHCEF Article of Interest

=====================================================
Steve Bailey
The Boston Globe (click here for a link to the original article)
15 November 2006

Last May the twin 800-pound gorillas of the Massachusetts healthcare industry, Partners HealthCare and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, helped organize a summit of the industry’s top leaders at the Hotel Commonwealth in Kenmore Square. A who’s who from the teaching hospitals, the insurers, and academia showed up for the start of an ambitious process. The topic: “Potential for Regional Collaboration to Improve Massachusetts Healthcare: The Economic Case.”

For some of those summoned, it was more than they could swallow. Here was Partners, formed more than a decade ago by the merger of Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital, the Coke and Pepsi of the state’s hospital industry, preaching the gospel of collaboration? This from an organization that has grown so large and rich that it has essentially redefined the market as Partners and Everyone Else. Paul Levy, chief executive of Beth Israel Deaconess, and Charlie Baker, chief executive of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, to name just two, dropped out in short order. (more…)

Chicago Tribune
October 31, 2006
Jury finds HMO bias in signing patients
Amerigroup shunned pregnant women, high-risk patients
By Rudolph Bush

A health maintenance organization hired by the government to provide coverage for the poor in Illinois will have to pay damages of $144 million for discriminating against pregnant women and other potentially high-risk patients, a federal jury in Chicago decided Monday.

After two days of deliberations, the jury found that Amerigroup Corp. and subsidiary Amerigroup Illinois sought to fatten their profits off Medicaid dollars paid into their plans by signing up healthy clients and intentionally avoiding those who had health issues. (more…)

Health Affairs: The Policy Journal of the Health Sphere

For immediate release
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
12:01 a.m. Eastern Time

Contact:
Christopher Fleming
(301) 347-3944
cfleming@projecthope.org

Health Affairs Study Pegs 2005 Health Care Spending Growth At 7.4 Percent, Much Faster Than Growth In The Economy And Workers’ Wages

Bethesda, MD — Health care spending growth stayed in a high-altitude holding pattern in 2005 as costs per privately insured American grew 7.4 percent — virtually the same rate of increase as the previous two years, according to a study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) published today as a Web Exclusive in Health Affairs.

Health spending growth continued to outpace overall economic growth in 2005, despite a robust 5.4 percent increase in the overall U.S. economy as measured by per capita gross domestic product (GDP), the study found. After peaking at 10.4 percent in 2001, health care spending growth slowed to 7.8 percent in 2003, followed by a 7.5 percent increase in 2004. Spending data for the first quarter of 2006 suggest continued stability — albeit at a relatively high rate of growth (7.7 percent). (more…)

UHCEF Article of Interest

=====================================================
Workday Minnesota (click here for link to original article)
3 October 2006

LA CROSSE, Wis. - The Wisconsin State AFL-CIO has become the 12th state labor federation to endorse legislation creating a national single payer health care system.

Acting on a motion submitted by the Western Wisconsin Central Labor Council, the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO endorsed HR 676 at its 24th Biennial Convention, Sept. 25-27 in La Crosse. HR 676, sponsored by Congressman John Conyers, D-Mich., would institute a single payer health care system in the United States by expanding a greatly improved Medicare system to every resident. (more…)

UHCEF Article of Interest

=====================================================
Jack Dew, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Berkshire Eagle
Friday, September 29

PITTSFIELD — Groundbreaking and historic. Deeply flawed and inadequate.

The new health insurance law that is slowly taking shape in Massachusetts is both, according to a panel of experts and legislators that met last night in Pittsfield.

The law is perhaps best understood as a framework to offer health insurance to most of the state’s uninsured. It requires every resident to have adequate health coverage by July 2007, but it did not create the plans in which people can enroll, nor did it allocate the funds to pay for those plans. (more…)

UHCEF Article of Interest

=====================================================
Sue Hutchison
San Jose Mercury News (click here for link to original article)

By now you have probably heard the grim statistic that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are caused by huge hospital bills following a catastrophic health crisis. If you think this could never happen to you, consider the case of Carole Detherage.

Detherage and her husband have emerged only recently from more than a decade of financial hell after they were forced to file for bankruptcy when they were hit with $65,000 in bills for the medical treatment of their infant daughter. And the Detherages had what they thought was a great PPO health plan. (more…)