Ramesh Ponnuru on the Mass Healthcare Plan

At National Review Online, Ramesh Ponnuru offers his analysis of the Massachusetts healthcare plan, and offers a few suggestions to Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney...

The governor has the ability to make modifications to this legislation through a line-item veto. He should use it to eliminate the mandates on coverage, strike the business taxes, and get rid of the individual mandate to buy insurance. (Or at least soften that mandate: His original proposal gave individuals more options in insuring themselves -- some of them pretty creative -- and did not rely on fines for enforcement.) Even if the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature rejects his changes, conservatives will appreciate his having made the effort.

Ponnuru notes that Governor Romney's original preference included a wider range of catastrophic insurance plans...

Romney proposed eliminating laws that made it hard to sell cheap, no-frills, high-deductible catastrophic insurance policies. (Make insurance more attractive to healthy young people, and you might not need to force them to buy it.) But the legislature refused to eliminate mandates on coverage, and required zero deductibles for the new plans for low-income people.

The legislature's refusal to create more insurance options should remind people that much of the source of our healthcare "crisis" is not implacable macroeconomic forces spiraling out of control, but bad government decisions that can be undone. We would face an "automobile ownership" crisis -- many people unable to buy cars -- if laws were passed making new BMW's the only type of car allowed to be sold. There's a place in the market for Ford Escorts as well as BMWs.

It's important for the citizens of Rhode Island to be aware of both this overriding principle and of the details of the Massachusetts plan, because Rhode Island may try to implement something similar in the near future. This is from a Felice J. Freyer article from Monday's Projo�

Rhode Island health-care leaders are watching with intense but wary interest as Massachusetts launches a landmark plan to provide health coverage for nearly everyone in the state...

"People have already approached me -- 'what would it take to do something like that here?' " said Christopher F. Koller, Rhode Island's health insurance commissioner. "There's an appetite for looking at this. There's a lot of potential applications for Rhode Island"...

Our goals are the same," said Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty, a candidate for governor. "We want to see all our citizens have health insurance. . . . If we make it a priority in Rhode Island, I think we can do it. . . . We may not be able to do it in one giant step as they did in Massachusetts"...

[State Senator Elizabeth] Roberts, like others, said she wants every Rhode Islander to have health insurance and is eager to learn the details of the Massachusetts law. She pointed out that many Rhode Islanders work and obtain health insurance in Massachusetts, so there will be "a lot of transfer of information and experience."

Unfortunately, if history is any guide, our state legislature is likely to Rhode Islandize the Massachusetts plan, implementing the features that maximize revenues collected by the government, whether or not they lead to an effective health insurance program.