Interesting result from this Rasmussen poll:

Just 26% of Massachusetts voters rate that state’s health care reform a success while 37% say it’s been a failure. Only 10% say it’s improved the quality of health care.

I’m from Oregon, a state that instituted a taxpayer-funded plan to provide health care that’s largely failed, so this poll result is hardly surprising to me. However, with “health care reform” looming at the federal level it’s amazing to me how uninterested the media is in looking at how it’s worked out in the state laboratories.

And when they do take a look-see, they generally get the story horribly wrong. Take this story from the NYT last year about the Oregon state’s health plan rationing care through a lottery. The story is bylined from my hometown of Bend, and I can tell you quite confidently that the NYT’s diagnosis of the state health care plan’s failures being all about not meeting the needs hispanic laborers and single mothers in the East Cascades is one-dimensional at best. The reality is that Bend is an almost entirely white town just outside a major ski resort; if there’s a lot of uninsured people, the mass influx of itinerant ski bums might be contributing to the high numbers of uninsured in the area. But it’s hard to drum up sympathy for the meeting the health care needs of the thrill-seeking, pot-smoking, irresponsible children from upper-middle class families.

Ok, so maybe I’m generalizing here (albeit at a highly informed level), but I think it’s pretty demonstrable is that the promise of free health care contributed enticed a lot of people from out of state to beautiful Oregon towns such as Bend. Growth exploded — and was exploding long before the recent real estate bubble. Naturally, the burden on social services increased dramatically and contributed to the implosion of the state health care plan. No matter how much they try and make health care reform a story about refusing to take care of the underclass, it remains largely a story about incentives.

Anyway, before we restructure 17 percent of the economy, it would be nice if the media took an in-depth and honest look at the states that have have tried to pick up the tab for residents health care. I suspect that won’t happen because they know they won’t like how it’s turned out.