Needed for health reform plan: more $$$$

A California Paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, through the Copley News Service takes a look at Massachusetts' health care reform law.

State officials and health care experts say the Massachusetts law has a good chance of achieving that goal by using both carrots and sticks. It is less clear whether its remedy would work in a state like California where money is scarce and the uninsured make up a larger share of the population.

In addition, Massachusetts might be strapped in a few years when it has to confront perhaps the most intractable health care problem of all: the relentlessly upward spiral of medical costs that every year forces more and more Americans to fend for themselves.

“Clearly, what's going to have to happen in the long run is more money will have to be injected in the program,” said Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped to write the state's plan. “We don't have to in the next year or two, but if you look five or 10 years down the road, if this program is going to continue to exist, it's going to take more money to keep it going.”

Related story from the same paper here.

Another good story: An article on the Health Care Quality and Cost Council in the latest Commonwealth magazine. (For some reason, the website only has the spring issue up, not the summer. You've got to register anyway, so you're better off picking it up at Borders or someplace, if you haven't already.)