RomneyCare Succeeds Wildly In Massachusetts

Today's Wall Street Journal has some great statistics on the success of RomneyCare in Massachusetts.

• Average wait time for a routine checkup with an internist: 48 days
• Time to secure an appointment with a gastroenterologist for chronic heartburn: 43 days, up from 36 last year
• Time to secure an appointment with an OB/GYN: 41 days, up from 34 last year

The numbers are going up, Up, UP! This is good news, right?

No! Putting this in terms President Tee Time can understand, lower scores are better.

The Journal also reports another grim milestone: "fewer than half of the state's primary care practices are accepting new patients, down from 70% in 2007, before former Governor Mitt Romney's health-care plan came online." So everyone in Massachusetts has "Health Care", they just have an increasingly difficult time finding a doctor.

You'd think with the lack of access to care that costs would be falling, but you'd be wrong. Massachusetts' health insurance premiums continue to rank among the highest in the country, and the only way this trend is likely to reverse is from ObamaCare closing the gap by increasing the costs for everyone else.

Massachusetts health regulators also estimate that emergency room visits jumped 9% between 2004 and 2008, in part due to the lack of routine access to providers. The Romney-Obama theory was that if everyone is insured by the government, costs would fall by squeezing out uncompensated care. Yet emergency medicine accounts for only 2% of all national health spending.

But RomneyCare really is succeeding wildly ... in proving its detractors right. And Mitt's continued defense of it, even though much less spirited than before, should move him into the "not just no, but hell no" category for the 2012 GOP presidential nod. After 4 years of listening to Barry try to blow sunshine up our asses on everything from ObamaCare to Green Jobs to the Summer of Recovery™, the last thing we need on our side is someone who refuses to acknowledge the reality of the policies he supports. So, buh-bye Mitt.

posted by Andy at 11:12 AM

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