Is Romneycare a Success?

Jonathan Cohn says yes in this New Republic piece:

Romneycare’s record is genuinely impressive. The main goal of the reforms was to make sure more people have access to health care and fewer people struggle with the costs of care bills. The evidence suggests it has accomplished both goals. Nearly everybody in the state has health insurance, while data suggest more people have regular access to care and fewer people face crushing health care costs. The improvement has been incremental—too incremental, for my taste. Plenty of people still struggle. But the program has certainly alleviated hardship, at a time when rising health care costs and a sluggish economy have been increasing hardship in the rest of the country. The usual rap on the Massachusetts health reforms is that they haven’t controlled medical costs. And it’s true: Romneycare hasn’t slowed the growth in health care spending. But that was never its goal. The idea was to expand coverage and then, hopefully, address costs later. This is precisely what the state is doing right now: Lawmakers and stakeholders are hammering out a law that, they hope, will blaze a trail for cost containment just as the previous reforms blazed a trail for coverage expansion.

Cohn points to this article by Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post for more detail on Massachusetts' efforts to rein in costs.

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