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Massachusetts to debut Medicare pay plan

Partners, Steward doctors to be paid for total care, rather than piecemeal

By Chelsea Conaboy

 |  Globe Staff  

  December 20, 2011

Massachusetts is set once again to become a testing ground for a major federal effort to overhaul the health care industry. Five of the 32 hospital systems and physician groups that will become “pioneers’’ in a program to change how doctors are paid for the care they provide Medicare patients are from eastern Massachusetts. Starting Jan. 1, the federal program will give them a budget to care for their more than 150,000 patients, rather than a payment for each test or treatment.

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