By Liz Kowalczyk
Boston Globe Staff
October 11, 2009
The state’s ambitious plan to shake up how providers are paid could have a hidden price for patients: Controlling Massachusetts’ soaring medical costs, many health care leaders believe, may require residents to give up their nearly unlimited freedom to go to any hospital and specialist they want.
Efforts to keep patients in a defined provider network, or direct them to lower-cost hospitals could be unpopular, especially in a state where more than 40 percent of hospital care is provided in expensive academic medical centers and where many insurance policies allow patients access to large numbers of providers.
But a growing number of hospital officials and physician leaders warn that the new payment system proposed by a state commission would not work without restrictions on where patients receive care – an issue some providers say the commission and the Patrick administration have glossed over.
“You can’t reap these savings without limiting patients’ choices in some way,’’ said Paul Levy, chief executive of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “It’s a huge issue, it’s huge.’’ Dr. James Mongan, president of Partners HealthCare, a Beth Israel Deaconess competitor, agreed that it wouldn’t “work without some restriction on choice.’’
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.
This new system of “global payments’’ would discourage overuse of expensive medical services, force providers to live within a budget, and improve coordination of care for patients, supporters argue.
There is little doubt that the state’s current system of broad choice and sometimes uncoordinated care has helped push Massachusetts health care costs above the national average. It can lead to unnecessary duplication of medical tests, when patients see multiple providers, each often unaware of what the others have done. And thousands of residents get knee replacement surgery, have babies at teaching hospitals, or other care, when often a less-expensive hospital would be more economical and provide good-quality care….
The rest of the article is here. It might be helpful reading during the health care reform debate currently taking place, to see how a government-run health care system in America might function and how much it will cost individual taxpayers.
