Health costs in the state continue to skyrocket, causing the Group Insurance Commission (GIC) to drop the Tufts and Harvard Pilgrim insurance plans. The GIC provides coverage to 440,000 state and town employees & retirees). This is a serious loss for employees, and also for the insurance companies that lost the GIC business.
Everything is being squeezed out by high inflation in health costs. Insurance companies have to raise rates, but the GIC can’t cover the full rate increases.
The writing was on the wall already last year – if I remember right, last year the GIC had already closed a bunch of popular but expensive insurance plans from new members.
The state legislature now plans to have public hearings about this crisis, but, IMHO, they should have legislated some form of equalization of price disparities at least one or two years ago. The reason why price equalization was not pushed more forcefully by the state legislature, again IMHO, was to protect hospitals and pharma, which are a big segment of the state economy.
The SEIU had been organizing a 2016 ballot question that would have addressed big disparities in payments by insurance companies to individual Massachusetts hospitals. This would have cost $440M yearly to Partners alone – the state’s largest health care provider, Partners. In May 2016, however, the SEIU made a deal with hospital industry executives and Beacon Hill leaders to drop the ballot question – with promises that Beacon Hill will address the problem by legislation in the next 5 years – and with an agreement with the Partners hospital network whereby more workers at Partners hospitals would unionize under the SEIU.
Please share widely!
The GIC’s sneak attack on our state’s dedicated, hardworking public servants purported savings are a paltry sum, and forces families into insurance options that most have never had before and know nothing about, without the kind of time to do the research and make sure they have access to their doctors.
This kind of change should have been the culmination of many months of conversation between workers and the state.
The purported savings — which I’m dubious will be born out at all — are small, and if workers were involved in the conversation they may have been able to figure out better ways to make the numbers work.
This is an attack on state workers, and a demonstration of how dangerous it was that health care was stripped away from municipal public workers years ago.
The legislature should take immediate action to make this right and undo what the GIC board did, and prevent the GIC board from ever being able to make that kind of sneak attack again.
Why didn’t you guys just pay what it cost so you could get the health plans you wanted?
I’m sorry to say that eveyone’s hands are dirty on this one.
http://bluemassgroup.com/2016/06/ma-health-care-cost-containment-gutted/
Thanks for reposting that, John. Turns out there is a new wrinkle in the cost containment story: according to Paul A. Hattis, who just posted an opinion piece on the CommonWealth Magazine, the Neighborhood Health Plan is a subsidiary of Partners.
https://commonwealthmagazine.org/health-care/four-thoughts-gic/
And, suspiciously, the GIC graded Neighborhood Health Plan as best among competitor for health cost rates.
Hattis is asking whether Partners may be making up for these lower cost rates by increasing rates on the commercial market:
“The GIC may be slightly better off short-term, the rest of us in the commercial market actually could be made worse off in terms of higher Partners prices translating into higher premiums. At the end of the day, Partners’s total commercial take would be the same, but now it has also been able to boost its owned insurance company which is trying to make the pivot away from covering Medicaid lives, to covering the commercially insured. (Partners could also end its discounts to Neighborhood Health after a year.)”
These are very good questions that the Legislature committee(s) could ask of Partners.
In other news, Partners has received green light from AG Maura Healey and from the MA Department of Public Health to acquire Mass Eye and Ear – a move designed to allow Mass Eye & Ear to charge insurance companies the higher Partners rates. “The deal could increase healthcare spending in the state by up to $61 million per year” (http://www.wbjournal.com/article/20180103/HEALTH/180109980/hpc-partners-mass-eye-and-ear-deal-could-cost-61m-annually).
When will someone admit that “markets” have failed once again and the solution is not more markets, as the Republicans say or better markets as some Democrats say. The solution is no markets. We’ve tried for decades now. It’s not working.
In a recent poll.,over 85 Percent of Canadians approve of their system of single payer, no markets.
Due in large part to our many insurance companies each with its own arcane rules, when compared to Canada, our health care ADMINISTRATION costs amount to 13.7% of benefits paid out while in Canada, the percentage is 2%.
Single Payer NOW.