Universal Healthcare - Not Paying the Bills

This Universal Health Care thing is really working out great. Not only has the Commonwealth Connector board not been able agree on what "affordable" means and what the baseline for required coverage will be, but the Commonwealth hasn't yet begun to collect fees from companies not offering coverage to their employees. The delay from the Commonwealth Connector, the board that is overseeing implementation of the legislation, in determining the baseline of coverage has resulted in the inability of the state to collect the fines fees. The budget estimated that $95 million would be collected from companies with 11 or more employees in fiscal 2007 – as we're only a month and a half from the end of this fiscal year it's not expected that a penny will be collected. Fiscal 2008 the prediction was for $76 million to be collected. According to the Globe, the new projections from Deval Patrick's administration and the state house of representatives put the estimated collection at closer to $24 million. Taxpayers will have to foot the bill. That's a $141 million bill for the two years.

There's all sorts of fuzzy math used to make sense of this problem. There's the fees that companies not providing insurance will have to pay, some millions of dollars the state already budgets to provide care to the poor, and the contributions made by individuals into the state supported programs all coming together to create a total on a magnitude that’s difficult for us to truly grasp. What it boils down to is that the Commonwealth hasn't collected fees from companies not providing coverage to employees – and that's a big chunk of change. A big chunk of change that the current, and next, year's budget relies on collecting. Without the collection of the fees there will be shortfall, money that has to come from somewhere.

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