Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

BMG PAC maxes out to Peter Smulowitz

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BMG PAC is proud to announce its second recipient of funds, Dr. Peter Smulowitz. We gave him the maximum $500. Smulowitz is running for the Norfolk, Bristol and Middlesex seat — Scott Brown's old seat. He'll be running against Republican funeral home director Richard Ross.

Smulowitz is an ER doctor, with a very good grasp of the cost drivers of health care inflation — see below. He is against casino gambling. He is for a progressive income tax — one of the points on the BMG fiscal responsibility agenda.

I can hardly think of a more pressing issue in Massachusetts than the spiraling cost of health care, which is sucking the life from every other industry and government priority. On his site, Smulowitz gives a good summary of what will be necessary:

Reduce Cost

The rising cost of health care is unsustainable. Health insurance premiums rise about 10% per year, and about 30% of our entire state budget is spent on health insurance and public subsidies. This has an enormous impact on families, businesses, and our communities. Peter offers some tangible solutions:

  • We should take immediate steps to pay hospitals not based on their market power, but on providing quality, efficient care to their patients.
  • We must reform our medical liability system. It is a dysfunctional system where the primary goal – patient safety – is not being met. Patients keep only about 30 cents of every dollar spent on the system. There is massive administrative waste, and the system drives physicians to over-test, which is estimated to cost from $50 to $200 billion each year nationwide. Peter supports traditional tort reform efforts and novel models of liability reform. During a fellowship with the State Senate Committee on Health Care Financing, Peter researched and promoted the importance of liability reform and the role of innovative strategies like those implemented at the University of Michigan. For more information please refer to his report at here.
  • We must continue to promote greater transparency of the cost of medical services as well as of proven quality measures.
  • Peter supports pilot programs to test payment incentives that reward more than the volume of services provided. We should pay more to keep people healthy, not only to treat them when they are sick.

 These are the right things to be saying. We can hope that Smulowitz will be a leader in reshaping our health care system to aim at providing value, i.e. health and long life; not simply as a giant cash generator for certain favored industries.

We hope and believe that Dr. Smulowitz will be a legislator of “imagination and integrity”, as the BMG PAC calls for. Congratulations Dr. Smulowitz.

By the way … this means we need to refill our coffers. Please feel free to chip in some money to the BMG PAC kitty in the left column. A little fundraising event is coming soon … details to come.

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Comments

  1. It magnifies your impact… it makes sure that the particular candidate notices, in a way $50 or $100 or $200 might not.

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    p>Of course, you can only max out as often as you’ve got $500 sitting around to do so.

  2. Or is that only when you endorse. đŸ˜‰

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    p>And, does this buy you access? Moving up in the world!

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    p>Congrats to Dr. Smulowitz!

  4. Or to regulate health care like utilities.

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    p>All other proposed measures are, as far as I know, experiments that have not been shown to reduce costs or increase quality.  (I tried clicking the “here” link, but it’s broken.)

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    p>Even if tort reform saved $200 million, the maximum posited here, that would only be a 1% drop in health care costs.  By contrast, moving to the same type of health care funding systems enjoyed by every other industrialized country would save 30% or more, based on the rates they pay.  (And they get better outcomes to boot.)

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