Health Care Reform Is Working In Massachusetts

A new report from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation found that the overall distribution of spending on health insurance by employers, individuals, and government remained essentially the same between 2005, one year before passage of Massachusetts health reform, and 2007, one year after lawmakers passed the Massachusetts health care reform law. A critical component of the Massachusetts 2006 health reform statute was that the responsibility of paying for expanded access to health insurance be shared among the three groups.

“Shared Responsibility, Government, Business, and Individuals: Who Pays What for Health Reform?” is the first assessment of how the spending to insure hundreds of thousands of additional people under the Massachusetts health reform law is being shared. Researchers Robert Seifert, M.P.A., and Paul Swoboda, M.S., of the Center for Health Law and Economics, University of Massachusetts Medical School, compared spending on health insurance in 2005, before implementation of health care reform in Massachusetts with spending on insurance in 2007, one year after the law’s passage.

“The costs of health reform are being shared and no one group is contributing a greater share to coverage than they were before reform,” said Seifert. “This is important information to have as the state grapples with ways to sustain the law in the face of increasing health care costs.”

In 2007, employers and union health plans accounted for lightly less than half of the total spending on health insurance in Massachusetts; government accounted for approximately 30 percent; and individuals accounted for about a quarter. In 2005, the breakdown of spending was the same, which means that the policy goal set forth in Chapter 58 that each sector paying for health insurance in Massachusetts continue to share the responsibility is being met.

“This report is yet another measure of health reform’s success,” said Jarrett T. Barrios, President of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, which funded the report. “When this law was passed, there was a promise that employers, government, and individuals would share the expenses of expanded access to care, and that’s what’s happened.”

The report also finds that the policy goal of paying for coverage while reducing spending on the uninsured — a crucial underpinning of federal support for the law in the form of a Medicaid waiver — is being met. From 2005 to 2007, spending on health services for the uninsured in Massachusetts fell by 40 percent, from $1.8 billion to $1.1 billion.