According to yesterday's The Hill, the Senate Finance Committee will be voting on healthcare reform today. As this goes forward, I would like to reference an article that appeared Sunday in the Boston Globe stating what is happening with healthcare reform in Massachusetts.
In 2006 Massachusetts enacted healthcare reform. The bill required everyone in the state to have health insurance, penalized people for not having it, and provided state plans for those who could not afford private insurance. Sound familiar?
The article in the Boston Globe is an update on how that plan is working. Because the costs of this plan have been so high, the state is planning to shake up how providers are paid in order to reduce the cost of the plan. The plan is to keep patients in a defined provider network, or direct them to lower-cost hospitals. Currently more than 40 percent of hospital care is provided in expensive academic medical centers and where many
The article points out:
"A state commission recommended in July that insurers largely scrap the current fee-for-service system - in which insurers pay doctors, hospitals, and other providers a negotiated fee for each procedure and visit - and instead pay providers a per-patient annual fee to cover all of the patient's medical care."
"...Under a global payment system, doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, and other providers would form large networks, called accountable care organizations, that would provide most of the care for individual patients and divvy up the payments. Doctors would try to coordinate patients' care within these networks, which would share electronic medical records and treatment plans. And to manage costs, they would try to direct patients to the hospital within the network that could provide good-quality care at the lowest cost, while generally using teaching hospitals for advanced care."
What these ideas show is that a state is not designed to finance, provide, or manage the healthcare of its residents. Some businesses work better in the private sector.
If you truly want to cut the cost of healthcare and reduce its impact on the federal deficit, tort reform will do that. The Congressional Budget Office wrote a letter to Orrin Hatch on October 9, 2009, explaining the impact tort reform would have on medical expenses in this country. Please read the letter. The CBO estimates that tort reform would reduce the federal deficit $54 billion over the next ten years. It seems to me that the way forward is tort reform, not the creation of a federally-funded healthcare nightmare.
Leave a comment