Talk:Massachusetts health care reform

Pre-existing conditions?

Can people buying health insurance on the individual market be denied coverage because they have pre-existing conditions as they can be elsewhere? This a big part of the debate on health care reform and since Massachusetts is one model the Feds may follow this would be an important fact to include in the article. --Jfruh (talk) 01:01, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Article needs massive cleanup

This article needs to be gutted. It has like a 20 paragraph lead (the biggest I think ive seen actually, only needs the first paragraph in lead..).. and the whole article is just way too wordy.. takes paragraphs to say what can be said in a sentence.. has terrible sourcing. anyone wants to take a stab a this feel free...It needs it -Tracer9999 (talk) 15:29, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I can agree with that, though it looks like the article's lead has been changed since your comment. Anyway, I read through this today and there was a lot of un-sourced information+most paragraphs don't have much direction to them.--Dark Charles (talk) 02:53, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

I have no idea how to reach this anonymous person but the comment about sources is absolutely incorrect. Every sentence of fact in the article before it was touched by someone named Tracer (are you people all ashamed of your names?) included a statement such as "according to the Department of Healthcare Finance and Policy, State of Massachusetts." Most also cited the actual DHCFP report. I have no problem with shortening the introduction by adding headlines (there being no obvious way to do that) but you totally changed the points about the strong connection between the healthcare delivery industry, medical education and the NON-PROFI healthcare insurance industry in Massachusetts and thereby are totally misleading anyone that reads the article now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dennisbyron (talk • contribs) 17:41, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Legal challenges section

The legal challenges section, which covers Fountas v. Dormitzer, seems to give undue weight to the challenges and arguments made against the act, going into great detail across several paragraphs about specific legal theories. There's a fairly negative tone when discussing the holdings of the various courts, including even a critical view of one of the courts' references. Additionally, apart from any point of view concerns, the section seems to be significantly too long; two paragraphs or so would seem to suffice to describe the legal challenge, and then its outcome. 72.66.31.230 (talk) 18:48, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. It seems to me that a lot of it is personal opinions about the validity or not of the rulings. If the article is going to have commentary on the rulings it should be from credible sources and not just original research (for want of a better description of the legal theories that the author is putting forth against the judges' findings). 174.111.242.35 (talk) 14:35, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

Children under 10 coverage

Are children under a certain age covered under mass health automaticly? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 3dconstruction (talk • contribs) 18:47, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Tax vs. penalty

The article has a section titled Employer Taxes and another section titled Individual Taxes. While reading the content of those sections, it seems to me that the sections should be use the word Penalties rather than Taxes. Penalties are assessed by the government if an individual or employer does not do something that it is required to do. Taxes are assessed by the government on income, sales, and so forth. Your thoughts? ~ Quacks Like a Duck (talk) 15:17, 3 February 2012 (UTC)

Reorganize and update data

Wikipedia Page Proposal: Reorganize and Update Data

We are looking to update any outdated data in the article as well as reorganize the content into clearer sections. Below you will find a detailed layout of what we had in mind. Currently there are separate sections for the legislation, implementation, and outcomes. We propose instead to organize sections by issue (the individual mandate, employer coverage, etc) and to discuss the legislation, implementation, and outcomes of each issue. We believe this will make the content more readable – since currently discussion of each issue is scattered throughout the article and it is difficult to connect the dots between the individual mandate provision, its implementation, and its outcomes on insurance coverage, for example.

While we do this we would like to add some new content, such as in the origins of the law – which currently doesn’t even mention the Medicaid waiver that drove the entire political process – and also in the realm of outcomes, where there is a lot of new data available since this article was last updated.

We would like to open this discussion to anyone who is interested in editing this article before making any changes. Please let us know if you have any input.

Proposed New Structure

1. Overview 2. Origins of the Law

  a. Add mention of Medicaid waiver and other ballot initiative
  b. Move "Legislation" section in to this

3. Insurance Coverage

  a. Overview
  b. Public Programs: Commonwealth care, (CeltiCare), Commonwealth Choice, Mass Health, safety    net
  c. Employer Sponsors
  d. Mandate

4. Access to Care

  a. Out of pocket spending, access data, ED use

5. Costs

  a. State Health Care Spending
  b. Private Health Care Spending
  c. Share Responsibility

6. Legal Challenges

  a. Keep this section as is  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Masscare (talk • contribs) 14:46, 23 April 2012 (UTC) 

I 100% agree. I came to this article looking for information about the costs of Romneycare and I had to weed through every single section. Even then there was nothing coherent. This is an excellent new structure.--173.76.46.132 (talk) 05:18, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

I think the problem is that at one time this was a fairly controversial reform in both Massachusetts and then nationally during the GOP primaries. However, once implemented it became far less controversial and reverted to the level of interest one would normally expect out of insurance regulations (not that much)50.201.255.38 (talk) 13:55, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Dennis Byron: RomneyCare has been effectively repealed but this article may or may not have some historical value. I think it is accurate at this point but contains a lot of accurate but so-what statements (such as "In 2010, the Boston Globe reported...") If anyone cares about the subject, in Massachusetts we have moved on to Soviet-era price controls on health costs (Romneycare was just about insurance) in place of RomneyCare's now failed market orientation. But that would require a separate Wikipedia article — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dennisbyron (talk • contribs) 12:09, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Massive cleanup needed, again

I happened to come across this article today and I couldn't believe how it was in such a bad shape right now, in contrast to how it was back when I made some minor edits to it. There are serious problems with the current state of the article:

• The way the sources are referenced, mostly in Background section, is just all wrong and it looks really bad for an encyclopedic entry.
• Multiple sections that begin with what resembles "The following section no longer applies because of PPACA" with citation/clarification needed tags. The article needs to explain the Massachusetts health care system as what it is, not how valid it is relative to the federal law. (The subject is the reform act, not the status of healthcare in general.) Any changes caused by the federal Affordable Care Act should be rewritten. Effects of the federal law on the state statute should be noted within the section as it's explained, or possibly be split off into a new section, instead of being labeled invalid at the beginning based on current status of U.S. healthcare.
• The current tone sounds more like a user's guide to Massachusetts statute. This is not how a Wikipedia article should be. For instance: NOTE: Anyone looking at all this detail because they are interested in Insurance should also look at the Connector Authority's ConnectorCare insurance. The purpose of the article is to explain what the law is/was, to a general audience with verifiable information from sources. It's not to attract those wanting to obtain or research insurance.

I tagged the page for cleanup for these reasons. Abstractematics (talk) 06:00, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Since there hasn't really been any changes for cleanup, I took the liberty to edit some things.

1. I fixed up the formatting for incorrect source references to a degree. Not only they looked very ugly (with bare URLs embedded into the article sections), they were written like an instruction manual or a promotion on the insurance. For the same reason, I removed the "interested in insurance" line I mentioned above.

I don't guarantee that these sources were reliable or valid, or that the information was neutral and accurate. I may go back and look at those things, but for now, I just tried to repair the formatting while leaving the content intact.

2. Also, I cut or edited sections that say that the provisions were repealed by the Affordable Care Act. The article had too much emphasis on how much of it was invalidated based on PPACA. If someone wants to add sourced information about how the PPACA affects health care in Massachusetts, I recommend that they be added under a new, separate section, titled "Changes by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" or something similar. This way, info about federal law effects won't hinder the sections that try to explain what the state statute is in itself.

It's worth noting that if you read the State level reform articles of the Health care in the United States template, they mention little if any of the Affordable Care Act. The Massachusetts health care article was likewise as recently as November 2013, despite how PPACA was around since 2010 and court decision made in 2012.

3. I also moved some information about amendments to the law from the Background section to Statute and Outcomes. Background section is supposed to explain the general background about the healthcare in Massachusetts, the context that led to the law. Subsequent amendments and changes are better discussed later.

Abstractematics (talk) 20:59, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

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Noticeboard discussion regarding NormSpier's recent edits

There is a noticeboard discussion regarding the neutrality of NormSpier's edits to this article (Special:Diff/901904756/912699623) and other articles related to Medicaid estate recovery. If you're interested, please participate at WP:NPOVN § Medicaid estate recovery and User:NormSpier. — Newslinger talk 17:16, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Everything in the section on Outcomes Post Transition to ACA is mine, after the first sentence. I'm getting the feeling the editors will want to delete it all. I won't do the deletion myself at this time, just in case the net belief of the editors is that it should be in. NormSpier (talk) 14:18, 31 August 2019 (UTC)