Massachusetts' health plan is failing

The health plan in Massachusetts led to increased demand, which boosted costs and brought price controls and rationing. The federal health plan will do the same.

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Sarah Beth Glicksteen/The Christian Science Monitor/File
Abigail Clark waits for her fiance at Whittier Street Health Center in Roxbury, Mass. The state's health plan, similar to the new federal health plan, is causing costs to rise, which has forced Massachusetts to put price controls on insurers.

James Capretta has an interesting column on the failure of Mitt Romney's health care scheme in Massachusetts (which is nearly identical to Obama's scheme, except that Obama's is on a federal level).

The subsidies it provides has - surprise, surprise - led to increased demand, which in turn has caused health care costs to increase even faster.

This has created big fiscal problems for the Massachusetts state government, which is now responding by price controls on insurers to limit cost increases. The insurers in turn respond by restricting access. Meaning that Massachusetts is rapidly moving towards the kind of "cost control by government rationing of health care" that the health care systems in Europe and Canada have used.

 And since Obamacare will create similar problems once it is implemented on a federal level, so will the rest of the United States later.

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