Yesterday represented an important deadline as it is the date when nearly everyone in the state was required to have insurance, whether through their jobs, on their own, or through a new program offering subsidized coverage to low-income residents.
The pressure is on because the number of uninsured who sign up is key to the law's success: If large numbers of people — especially the young and healthy — flout the law, premiums could rise faster in future years, and the goal of cutting the number of uninsured to near zero would be lost.
The question now is, will people who don't need health care buy into this plan?" asks Bill Walczak, chief executive of the Codman Square Health Center, a community clinic in Boston. "Is it affordable enough for people who must buy their own policies?"
You see signs of the state’s drive to get people to buy coverage everywhere, in television ads, at Fenway Park, and there is a special hotline that is receiving more than than 13,000 a week.
The success or failure in Massachusetts could have an impact across the nation, as lawmakers in several states and Congress search for ways insure the now more than 44.8 million uninsured.
"The whole country is watching Massachusetts," says economist Paul Ginsburg at the Center for Studying Health System Change, a non-partisan research group in Washington. "Whether it can succeed with an individual mandate will shape what happens at the federal level in 2009."