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State regulations promulgated in December are going to close down church-based shelters for the homeless. The regulations’ given rationale is the state’s legitimate interest in safe and sanitary conditions in overnight shelters. But as written, the regulations would require churches to spend impossible sums to achieve compliance; and, perhaps tellingly, they would delimit a homeless person’s stays to 35 overnights per year, and would ban them altogether from June 15 to September 15. Such restrictions apparently will not apply to state-supported shelters — only to those run by churches and private organizations such as Salvation Army. One wonders if the hidden agenda isn’t to “eliminate the competition” provided by faith-based voluntary organizations in order to clear a path for much […]

Two thoughts on why the Massachusetts Connector has done such a horrible job meeting the demands of small business for affordable health insurance choices: (1) Some say that it is all Governor Patrick’s doing. Certainly, elections matter, and the Governor has paid no attention to the issue until recently, and in a really ham-handed way (price controls! yup, that’s a great idea…). But it’s more complicated than that. The fact is that the Connector was created in a very topdown manner that is not helping to meet the needs of a dynamic set of customers. A Boston Globe report on August 4, 2006, three months before the 2006 election, noted the following: The four Medicaid plans that will be offered […]