It does that by bringing in as speakers more than 50 top health officials, policy people, and researchers. It also brings the fellows out to watch first-hand how the system works, from walking the streets at night with mental health case workers to riding a Medflight helicopter.
The program, now entering its eighth year, is sponsored by the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, with help from the Maine Health Access Foundation, New Hampshire’s Endowment for Health, the Northwest Health Foundation, and other non-profits.
The fellowship will run for nine days, beginning May 1. It is housed at Babson College’s Center for Executive Education in Wellesley, and is operated in collaboration with leading journalism organizations. Larry Tye, who covered medicine and health at the Boston Globe for 15 years, directs the program. A former Nieman Fellow and author of five books, Tye has taught journalism at Boston University, Northeastern, Tufts, and Harvard.
The fellowship will focus on a series of pressing health care issues, from insuring the uninsured to mental illness, backups in emergency rooms, ethnic and economic disparities in the delivery of care, and environmental health. Attention also will be given to public health scares, from understanding the deadly powers of illnesses like the avian flu to knowing the capabilities – and limits – of public health authorities who respond to terrorism and disease outbreaks.
And the teaching does not end when the fellows head back to their stations or papers. Tye, the program director, will be on call for the journalists for the full year following their nine days in Wellesley. He will help when they are stuck for ideas, or for whom to call on a story. He will assist in thinking out projects and carving out clearer definitions of beats. He also maintains a web site where fellows post their stories.
We’ll know who’s coordinating Wangsness et al’s source base in the health care world.
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p>”The fellowship will focus on a series of pressing health care issues…”
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p>Could it possibly focus on them in a way that conflicts with BC/BS’s interests? I think we should be long past the illusion that just because BC/BS is a nonprofit that it’s an unbiased or public minded organization.
the foundation is a separate entity from BC/BS itself. That said, yeah, one does wonder …
Many observers have concluded that BCBS MA Foundation is not nearly as independent from the BCBS MA Corporatation as BCBS would have the public think. Here’s why:
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p>Andrew Dreyfus, the BCBS MA Foundation’s first CEO spent a few years giving away BCBS money to almost all the health reform advocacy groups and community health centers in the state. After Mr Dreyfus cultivated many relationships doling out BCBS funds to meagerly-funded groups (including one I was the part-time director of, the Alliance to Defend Health Care) Mr Dreyfus was promoted to Corporate VP of BCBS in charge of “community relations” and now he’s Corporate Executive Vice President of Health Care Services.
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p>The “grants” doled out by the corporate giants of the MA health care industry have the effect (intended, many would argue) of discouraging advocacy groups from speaking out in ways that would be critical of BCBS and other industry titans. Partners Health Care Corp. uses a similar technique with grants given out thru their “community benefits” program which is how they maintain the facade of being a “not-for-profit” corporation despite posting hundreds of millions in surplus each year.
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p>What impact these corporate heavyweights exert on media coverage of health policy issues is worrisome, indeed. The justifiable concerns around the “BCBS health coverage fellowships” are in addition to the concerns over the clout that’s been gained by BCBS, Partners, et al, from their increasingly large amount of spending on advertising as this is a central source of media’s ever-shrinking revenue…
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p>Many concerned observers, myself included, have concluded that the BCBS MA Foundation buys silence from scores (if not hundreds) of the health care access and advocacy groups across the state, along with numerous facilities that provide health care. Cleve Killingsworth, the current CEO of corporate BCBS MA, sits on the board of the BCBS Foundation and from my quick perusal of other BODs it looks as though just about every other board member is from an organization that receives funding from BCBS. Take a look yourself at this link http://www.bcbsmafoundation.or…