With the fight over health insurance rate increases continuing in Massachusetts, Marketplace’s Nancy Marshall Genzer examines the extent to which the Massachusetts experience is generalizable. At least qualitatively, I think it is, which is what I told her.
That is, at least in the short-term concerns over costs will manifest themselves as fights between regulators and insurance companies. Meanwhile, tackling the much larger sources of increasing costs–the prices of medical services and the manner in which providers are paid–will be deferred nationally, as it has been in Massachusetts.
