Over at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation blog, Community Catalyst director Robert Restuccia talks about some of the less obvious reasons Massachusetts is an important model for national health reform:
Massachusetts as model -- it's a common claim in health care policy circles. With the lowest rate of uninsured residents in the nation - just 2.7 percent - it’s clear to those watching that Massachusetts’s mix of Medicaid expansions, sliding scale subsidies, private insurance reforms and individual mandate are working to expand coverage and have served as the template for national reform.Among them? Putting coverage expansion before cost containment. Find out what the rest are here.But there are other, less obvious lessons from the Massachusetts experience that have not really filtered into the political and policy discourse in Washington.