Stan Rosenberg

Stan Rosenberg (D-Amherst), who brokered $1.6 million in emergency funds to help Cooley-Dickinson Hospital stem losses it says it will encounter if it agrees to cover the 2,000 seniors who will lose their Medicare HMO option when Kaiser pulls out.

"If there are enough paying customers -- a dense enough mass -- in a particular region that has enough health care providers to ensure decent competition, it's a good fit.But in those places where you don't have an economy of scale, more rural areas such as the upper Pioneer Valley, for example, it fails.You can't blame the HMO.They cannot be expected to operate at a loss."

Woolhandler argues that the competitive free market approach cannot work in health care.
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"Basically we have a patchwork quilt of a healthcare system," said Rosenberg, who supports a current initiative to establish a Health Care Council to develop a state health care system."The proliferation of insurers, types of plans, the growing number of programs offered by government to substitute for programs being dropped in the private sector, all this leaves people confused; it adds to inefficiency in the private system, leads to money being used inefficiently.The government is only acting in the absence of health care providers.We're only doing what we have to do."

In the six years since politicians and the public ran screaming from President Clinton's national health plan, there has been a backlash in opinion on the street, giving proponents of mandatory health coverage hope and opportunity.