The long effort to develop an effective cost-containment law for the Massachusetts health care system has entered a worrisome phase. With just two weeks left in the Legislature’s formal session, a conference committee is reportedly making little headway on resolving critical differences and arriving at compromise legislation.
The committee pits House legislators pushing hard for a plan that would give state regulators broad powers to enforce health care cost caps against Senate negotiators arguing for using a lighter hand to nudge the market toward more cost-conscious practices. Several knowledgeable sources say things have grown so tense that one meeting last week ended abruptly, with legislators snapping at each other.
Comments
" Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts has made promising progress toward reining in health care spending by paying physicians a set annual sum for patient care rather than a fee for every service. " - Did anyone at the Globe actually read this study? The authors state that they only looked at ambulatory primary care indicators. The Globe is justifying a return to capitation, a system that failed in the 90s, based on one study that only looked a very small part of healthcare. They did not look at specialty or inpatient care yet the changes advocated by the Globe will apply to those areas, The Globe can say it thinks we should go back to a system that caused so much damage in the past but this study proves nothing. Boston Globe please do some real healthcare reporting and stop echoing press releases.
Well a pox on both legislative houses. Neither has proposed anything different and each of these trial regs has failed in the past. The adults should take charge. We need real insurance to lower the cost of health insurance premiums. This requires uniform negotiated fees for the same services in hospital and out. How many times does it have to be demonstrated some some actors in the medical field have a preferred brand name even if they are no better than others? Real insurance puts everyone in the same risk pool but unlike other types of insurance you can not penalize people for being ill or their inability to manage their health in excruciating detail. Having everyone in and nobody out dilutes the cost and lowers premiums substantially. Chopping up the pools by cherry picking healthier people has been the norm for insurers for too long. Medicaid and Medicare came about because private insurers could not haul in cash if they had to cover categories with actual sick people. Insurance is suppose to pay when you are ill not create sectors that can not pay and consequently die or become bankrupt. This is an ongoing travesty for this country and further impedes economic growth. Real patriotic capitalists understand this.