In the most recent newsletter from Consumers for Health Care Choices, Greg Scandlen has some fun with the Massachusetts “Connector Authority” created by then-Governor Mitt Romney:

It must be fun to be a Grand Poobah of health insurance in Massachusetts. Here you sit on your Grand Poobah cushion while the peasants come before you to plead their cases. One begs you to limit copays for visits and drugs because they add up pretty quickly. A doctor asks you to disallow deductibles of $2,000 because it provides “inadequate coverage.” Yet a business owner says that is the only kind of coverage they can afford. A self-employed artist requests that you consider net income, not gross income because she spends so much of her gross on art supplies. A consumer advocate asks you to disallow Health Savings Accounts, while an AIDS activist wants you to provide unlimited lifetime benefits. And it is up to you — the All Powerful and Mighty Grand Poobah of the Connector — to grant these wishes or deny them on behalf of the entire fiefdom. All must obey or be severely penalized.

And yet the deadline for obedience (July 1) approaches and a mere 100 people a week (out of the 160,000 required) are signing up for coverage. In the Olden Days we could send Paul Revere to “every Middlesex village and farm” to alert the peasants to their new “responsibility,” but today we’ll have to settle for spending $3 million in taxpayer money on advertising and delay the deadline until November. Surely by then, they will humble themselves before the Poobahs and do as they have been told. There will be no Tea Parties this time around.