Landmark Deal Improves Healthcare in Mass., But Not Too Much

On Friday, while Bostonist looked longingly toward a weekend with promised 45-degree temperatures, legislative bigwigs finally hammered out a compromise healthcare bill.

You may recall that the House of Representatives approved a version that imposed a tax on employers with more than ten employees who failed to provide healthcare. The tax was calculated as a percentage of payroll. The idea of that bill was to cover every uninsured person in the Commonwealth. However, it also raised the ire of business groups, whose general policy is that it is much better for other people to pay for something than for them to pay for it.

The new plan would charge the same employers a flat fee of $295 per employee per year, which is apparently the average cost that the state incurs in providing care to the uninsured. Even though that comes to a paltry 15.5 cents an hour (and still leaves many people without insurance), some business groups (and the Herald) insist the plan is just too awful and socialistic and anti-industry for words. You'll forgive Bostonist for not feeling too bad, especially when the big offenders aren't mom-and-pop operations, they're local juggernauts like Dunkin' Donuts and Friendly's. Besides, as the law stands now, every employer, even those who provide health insurance, contributes $62 per employee to the state uninsured care pool. So all this does is shift $133 of the burden to the folks who are actually responsible for it.

The up-side of this development for everyone is that the legislature can now get back to all the ordinarily stuff it does that has been on hold while healthcare was sorted out. That may not seem very exciting to you, dear reader, but for (this) Bostonist, who's been waiting to have a job offer from a state-funded agency finalized, it makes a great deal of difference. That said, may we selfishly urge the legislature to go with the Senate version of a certain supplemental appropriations bill, so that public defenders can get a substantial raise? (Not because that would affect us in any way, of course, just because it's the right thing to do.)

Photo: Although he appears to be painting with watercolors, this guy is actually somehow involved in healthcare. We don't know how, but we know his picture is in the public domain.