ON MAY 31, Gov. Charlie Baker signed a new law to avert a proposed 2016 state ballot initiative that would have redistributed as much as $450 million annually from Partners HealthCare hospitals to most of the state’s other hospitals by establishing stringent limits on hospital price variation. The new law, “Chapter 115, An act relative to […]
John E. McDonough
Posted inHealth Care, Opinion
House GOP health care plan is an empty backpack
THIS WEEK, US House Speaker Paul Ryan released a long-promised plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. Most of the plan, “A Better Way: Health Care,” developed by a House task force, includes familiar ideas that have been in Republican rhetoric even prior to the ACA. Coverage of the plan’s basics can be found here […]
Posted inHealth Care, Opinion
Back to the future with Paul Ryan
THIS PAST WEEK at Georgetown University, House Speaker Paul Ryan proposed scrapping an essential component of the Affordable Care Act that bans health insurance companies from imposing pre-existing condition exclusions on consumers and prohibits the practice of “medical underwriting” to discriminate against anyone with a current or prior medical condition. Instead, he proposed, states could […]
Posted inHealth Care, Opinion
Mass. health care reform turns 10
APRIL 12TH IS the 10th anniversary of the signing of Chapter 58, Massachusetts’s landmark universal health insurance law (An Act Providing Access to Affordable, Quality, Accountable Health Care) that served as a key model for the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA/ObamaCare) signed in March 2010. A more compelling example of states as “laboratories of democracy” […]
Posted inHealth Care, Opinion
Behind the Massachusetts Health Connector’s rehab
AT 11:59 PM on October 31, 2015, about 20 nervous state officials and contractors hunched around computer terminals in a non-descript office in the Charles F. Hurley Building near Beacon Hill. Among them was Louis Gutierrez, executive director of the Massachusetts Health Connector, appointed the previous February by newly inaugurated Gov. Charlie Baker. The launch […]
Posted inHealth Care, Opinion
Trump’s health plan folly
ON MARCH 14, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a bipartisan federal budget watchdog group, released an economic analysis of the recent health proposals made by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Their key findings: “Donald Trump’s plan to repeal and replace Obamacare would cost nearly $500 billion over a decade, or $270 billion […]
Posted inHealth Care, Opinion
Amazing gains in global health – 2015
WE GET SO caught up these days in the Donald and Hillary and Ted and Bernie shows. Yet there is so much else going on in the world about which Americans never hear. Permit me to draw attention to This Week in Global Health (TWiGH) which has been producing weekly live online programming on global […]
Posted inOpinion
Sanders vs. Clinton on health care
IT’S FUNNY HOW things turn out on the campaign trail. Since all Republican presidential candidates pledge to repeal the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare, they have little to argue about. The fireworks are among Democrats as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders argue the future of US health reform and, specifically, the merits of Sanders’s new single payer/Medicare […]
Posted inBallot Questions, Health Care, Opinion
Setting hospital prices by ballot question
A LOOMING 2016 ballot initiative threatens to upend the foundations of hospital finance in Massachusetts, even if the measure never reaches the voters. The clash involves a fractured hospital community, insurers, a labor union, and state government in a controversy more than 25 years in the making. For decades, savvy Massachusetts policy entrepreneurs have learned to […]
Posted inHealth Care, Opinion
Obamacare repeal would mean 22 million people lose coverage
TWENTY-TWO MILLION – that’s how many Americans would lose their health insurance, according to the US Congressional Budget Office, if the reconciliation legislation approved by the House of Representative on Wednesday by a 240-181 vote were to become law. The Senate approved the same bill in December and the House adopted it yesterday with no […]