Didn t the Managed Care Act passed by the legislature over the summer of 2000 take care of all these problems?
Definitely not. The hastily put-together bill was a clear response to the presence of Question 5 on the 2000 ballot. On the patients right issue, it resurrected a bill that had been languishing in committees on Beacon Hill for three years and gone nowhere. This does represent a modest but useful step forward in this area. However, the Beacon Hill plan does nothing to guarantee access to health care for everyone. Instead, it calls upon the legislature to form a committee to hire a consultant to write a report. That s no guarantee of anything. By contrast, we propose a law that every citizen of Massachusetts be guaranteed access to health care by an explicit deadline. No ifs, ands, or buts. Similarly, the new state law leaves the door wide open to for-profit control of Massachusetts financially vulnerable hospitals and HMOs, a prospect that has out-of-state businesses salivating. It even provides a road map describing how such acquisitions can be done legally. By contrast, we propose a c
