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Making Universal Health Insurance Work in Massachusetts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2021

Alan Sager
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Extract

High U.S. health costs have been one of the main barriers to enacting universal access to care in recent decades. It is therefore surprising that Massachusetts, with the nation's highest per capita health spending, last year promised health insurance to all citizens. Declaring that “the access of residents of the Commonwealth to basic health care services is a natural, essential, and unalienable right” protected by the Massachusetts Constitution, the new health law, Chapter 23 of the Acts of 1988, legislates a promise that insurance be offered to all by 1 April 1992.

The law was the product of almost three years of bargaining. One closely involved person said this was “the most controversial and heavily fought battle in the past 25 years in the Massachusetts State House.” Deals had to be struck. Perhaps the most important of the law's compromises is embodied in its title: “An Act to Make Health Security Available to All Citizens of the Commonwealth and to Improve Hospital Financing.” Obtaining the votes for the law's universal access provisions required promising Massachusetts hospitals substantially higher revenues.

Type
Article
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , Fall 1989 , pp. 269 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1989

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