COLUMN: IN OUR OPINION

The latest figures on Massachusetts' landmark restructuring health insurance law offer more evidence that the system of mandates and subsidies enacted two years ago is beginning to have the hoped-for result.

The move to restructure health care financing

was prompted in part by the alarming growth in the cost of "uncompensated care" provided for many of the estimated 600,000 Massachusetts residents - nearly 10 percent of the population - who lacked health insurance. That situation ill-served the uninsured individuals who, lacking access to primary care physicians, had to use expensive emergency room care. Nor did it well serve hospitals and taxpayers who ultimately bear the cost.

Encouraging signs that the insurance program was having "a positive impact" were reported by the Massachusetts Hospital Association earlier this year. The association calculated that last year, when the program got under way in earnest, the cost of uncompensated care statewide dropped 2.7 percent from the year before.

A status report from the Patrick administration this week reinforces that assessment. Since the program was enacted in June 2006, about 439,000 more individuals have joined the ranks of the insured. Significantly, nearly half of them opted for nonsubsidized private insurance plans.

Also telling, the administration's report confirms the MHA's assessment that there has been a significant drop in the number of visits to hospital emergency rooms and community health centers by uninsured patients. By one estimate, such visits in the third quarter of last year were down 37 percent from the year before. Presumably, those patients now get routine care from primary care physicians.

As we have noted before, such assessments must be viewed with a degree of caution. The new law remains a work in progress, particularly in terms of its financing. The reluctance of federal health care officials to continue the special assistance needed for the program is especially worrisome.

That said, there is increasingly credible evidence that the bold health care experiment is, at least, discouraging unwarranted use of costly emergency-room care, as its supporters on Beacon Hill and beyond had hoped.