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HB 939 - - - 'Health Insurance Without Maryland Mandates' MARYLAND TAXPAYERS ASSOCIATION (MTA) Chairman Busch, Sponsors Kach, Mitchell, and Eckardt, and members of the committee, I am Richard Falknor, vice president of the Maryland Taxpayers Association (MTA). I am accompanied by Dr. Robert Moffit, Domestic Policy Studies director of the Heritage Foundation, who regularly participates in health care assemblies around Maryland. Dr. Moffit has worked closely with MTA and other citizen groups for two years to give us a better insight into making the Maryland health care system more consumer friendly and market oriented. Dr. Moffit, a Severna Park, Maryland resident, speaks today, of course, only for himself, but his recommendations for reforming Maryland health regulation are posted on MTA's website http://www.mdtaxes.org, and the entire prepared text of his testimony today will be promptly posted there as well. MTA strongly supports this initial step in reforming Maryland health regulation. The enactment of HB 939 would give Maryland small businesses and individuals access to an affordable package of health insurance. MTA would ask this panel to consider three steps we believe would be improvements: removal of the cap on the percentage of 'limited benefit' policies insurers can sell; specifying that a limited-benefits package must meet requirements for catastrophic protection, as well as the inclusion of hospitalization and physician services as categories of benefits, safeguards that Dr. Moffit can spell out in more detail; and language requiring the earliest possible regulatory execution of this bill when enacted in view of the likelihood that the current recession is exacerbating the lack of access to essential health insurance. Why do we call this an initial step? MTA believes it is especially important that future Maryland governors and the general assemblies work out bipartisan consumer-choice market-oriented solutions to Maryland's health care challenges. In this regard, we draw the committee's attention to the Beacon Hill Institute's study Universal Health Care and the Maryland Economy http://www.mbrg.org/publications.html of last September. Their analysts project in detail additional tax burdens and serious job losses should the single-payer or multi-payer systems be permanently put into effect. MTA believes Maryland can do better not just fiscally but in terms of good medicine for all its residents. |