With the number of people covered by public insurance growing – MassHealth covers about 2 million people, or 30 percent of the Massachusetts population – so too have the cross-subsidies borne by employers, employees, and taxpayers. Given our aging population and the shrinkage of our small group health insurance market, these cross subsidies by the private market will likely grow larger without intervention. Higher Medicaid reimbursement rates to providers could alleviate this cost-shift burden.
Health Care
Posted inHealth Care
Data indicate warning signs for Massachusetts health care
CHIA’s most recent total health care expenditure data show a 5.8 percent growth rate, Peters said, which represents the highest one-year growth trend since measurement began in 2012, with the exception of the “anomalous” COVID year of 2021.
Posted inHealth Care
‘Concordant care’ called crucial in improving Black childbirth outcomes
A recurring theme was that people of color, and Black women in particular, benefit from having their care provided by someone who looks like them and who understands their experience in the world.
Posted inOpinion
Medicare Advantage driving home health crisis
It’s no surprise that referrals to home health organizations are skyrocketing as hospital capacities worsen. Yet we are struggling to keep up with demand.
Posted inHealth Care
House passes broad health care legislation
The House voted 152-1 to approve a bill that combines reforms intended to avert a repeat of the Steward Health Care crisis with changes designed to boost state oversight of facility expansions and closures, refine cost control tools to better account for fluctuations, and increase funding for hospitals that typically serve high shares of low-income patients and people of color.
Posted inHealth Care
Status of primary care system keeps slipping
The Center for Health Information and Analysis and Massachusetts Health Quality Partners unveiled a primary care dashboard on Thursday to track the primary care situation, and officials from both organizations sounded alarm bells at the initial findings.
Posted inOpinion
House health care bill needs some work
A health care reform bill headed for a debate and vote in the House next week has some very good elements, but it also has some worrisome provisions, in particular the well-intended but flawed effort to raise commercial prices paid to the lowest-paid hospitals.
Posted inHealth Care
Steward landlord denies its rents are excessive
Edward Aldag Jr., the chairman and CEO of Medical Properties Trust, and other members of the firm’s leadership group told financial analysts that the rents the Alabama-based company is charging Steward for its hospitals are not excessive and that they fully expect those rents to remain at or near current levels when the hospitals are sold to “better qualified operators” over the next several months.
Posted inHealth Care
Steward has its doctors over a barrel in Optum deal
If the Optum purchase moves forward, Steward will directly transfer the previous provider agreements to Optum without an opportunity for physicians to negotiate a new deal, despite an entirely new corporate change-over.
Posted inHealth Care
Could consumer representation on hospital boards have prevented Steward problem?
On The Codcast, Donahue reflected on the history of health planning councils in conversation with hosts Paul Hattis of the Lown Institute and John McDonough of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.