Voices in Healthcare

The Massachusetts Hospital Association (MHA) has launched a public outreach campaign to highlight hospitals' key positions on healthcare payment reform. In the face of increasing misperception that hospitals are the primary driver for rising healthcare costs, MHA's effort sets the record straight and brings hospitals' message to a broader audience.

Massachusetts hospitals and other healthcare providers are being mislabeled as the "reason" for escalating healthcare costs - and that's simply not true. Massachusetts hospitals are committed to being part of the cost solution, but we cannot do it all, and we cannot do it alone. Everyone involved - caregivers, insurers, businesses, consumers, legislators, and government - must share and contribute toward making healthcare payment reform work.

MHA's vision includes the following five shared changes that must occur in Massachusetts to achieve successful healthcare payment reform:

• All stakeholders must recognize that hospitals already have reduced costs significantly
• Insurance companies should stop playing doctor
• Government must close the underpayment gap for public healthcare programs
• Everyone must understand that hospitals are major employers as well as community anchors 
• Together we must develop a payment system that makes sense.
  

We are at a critical point in the healthcare reform debate. There are some meaningful short-term steps that can help the containment of health premiums for small businesses across the Commonwealth without compromising long-term reform efforts - including limited low-cost networks, a minimum insurer Medical Loss Ratio of at least 90 percent, the development of a high-risk reinsurance trust fund and limitations on open enrollments for individuals purchasing individual coverage. MHA is advocating for those and other measures with state legislative and executive leaders. But comprehensive, long-term payment and delivery reform remain the only real solutions to escalating healthcare costs.