THE PIONEER BLOG

Steve Poftak

Borne Back Ceaselessly Into the Past?

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The Globe’s Adrian Walker has been all over Roxbury Community College this week, dinging them for failing to properly deliver financial aid to their students, to take advantage of the business community’s offer to start a job training program (which eventually ended up at Bunker Hill Community College) and to properly report its crime statistics. These revelations are a shame, given the leadership role that RCC could play in the revitalization of the area. But for long time observers, RCC has long been held to a much lower standard than other public entities. Back when I was at Administration and Finance in the mid-2000s, it was a running joke in the budget office about when the last time RCC had […]

Joshua Archambault

Is Maine Leading the Way on Health Care?

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The Commonwealth is currently debating greater government intervention in our health care system with payment reform legislation. Maine is moving in the opposite direction. This press release was just put out by the think tank Maine Heritage Policy Center. Unprecedented: Rates for health insurance plans to drop as much as 60% PORTLAND – Rates for individual health care plans in Maine will drop as much as 60% in July as a result of health reform law PL 90, the free-market health insurance reform bill passed by the legislature last year. The Maine Heritage Policy Center was a key advocate of the bill. Information contained in Anthem’s most recent rate proposal indicates substantial positive results from the law’s passage. After years […]

Steve Poftak

The Struggles of 38 Studios

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The State of Rhode Island is working hard, very hard, to make sure that Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios remains a going concern. It appears the state of Rhode Island is on the hook for $50m+ if 38 Studios defaults on its loan that is backstopped by a state guarantee. And let me be clear — no one wants the company to fail. Back when the deal initially went down, I said that Curt Schilling has every right to find the most lucrative deal for his company but that the state of Rhode Island was making a mistake. What the state did was make a big, concentrated, and multi-layered bet. Big — $75m big. Concentrated — $75m of a $125m initiative […]

Joshua Archambault

Will Your Next Cancer Treatment Be In New Hampshire?

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New Hampshire lawmakers have a long history of jeering Massachusetts over taxes, but it looks like they have moved to a much bigger sacred cow, health care. The Boston Globe ($)recently reported that in New Hampshire there is a bill, “eliminating a state review process and exempting it [specialty destination hospitals] from a tax that New Hampshire’s nonprofit hospitals pay.” By contrast, the two recently proposed payment reform bills on Beacon Hill move in the opposite direction. The bills “reform” the determination of need process to make it more government-centered and will severely limit any future expansion of similar facilities in the Commonwealth. Massachusetts policymakers should be watching our borders closely as they aim to significantly alter our local payment […]

Steve Poftak

Health Care Reform in Record Time

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If you blinked over the past seven days, you might have missed the rollout of two major pieces of legislation that will dramatically restructure health care delivery here in Massachusetts. While the Governor put his proposal out over a year ago, it has taken the Legislature a long time to take up the issue. Suddenly, everyone is in a rush. The House rushed their bill out the door at an oddly-timed late Friday afternoon press conference on Friday, May 4th. They plan on debating the bill in a month or so. The Senate is in even a bigger rush — their bill came out on Wednesday, May 9th. Amendments are due by 5 PM on Friday. And debate begins on […]

Joshua Archambault

Red or Blue Pill for Payment Reform? Both Won’t Work

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Are the House and Senate giving us a false choice for how to control health care costs in Massachusetts? Aren’t there other options? A few major themes have emerged from the two payment reform proposals and highlight the fact that they fail to align incentives for patients to be more involved in the purchase of their health insurance and their health care. For example, even with full transparency of cost and quality (which is a huge lift on its own) for many patients, high-cost still correlates with higher quality in medicine. A recent report from Attorney General Coakley proved this theory wrong, but simply providing patients with cost data without placing the right incentives in their health plan to choose […]

Jim Stergios

Massachusetts’ Katrina Moment

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In a previous job, I spent a lot of time in major Massachusetts cities outside of Boston. Cities like New Bedford and Fall River, with their stunning coastal views, and cities at the edge of Boston with so much potential like Lynn and Brockton, always intrigued me. But I have to admit to two favorites–Springfield and Lawrence. They are indeed among the most troubled, but they are both architecturally unique, with strong neighborhoods and muscular industrial histories. Whenever in Lawrence, I would try to make it to Saint Anthony’s Maronite Church or eat at Cafe Azteca. The smells in each place are enough to keep you going for days. A sensation similar to the “beignet haze” you get walking within […]

Steve Poftak

Manufacturing Still Matters

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Way back in 2006, Pioneer was interested in manufacturing. Our Measuring Up study on the cost of doing business in Massachusetts showed that manufacturing was still an important employer in the state and, importantly, was a source of good wages in the places it was located. More recently, we’ve been intrigued by the possibility of a resurgence in the sector based on rising costs at some of our off-shore competitors. Now, Brookings Institution has done a comprehensive study of manufacturing jobs across the country. In our major metropolitan areas (Boston, Springfield, Worcester) , manufacturing jobs account for 7% to 11% of total jobs. There’s been a roughly 30% decline in the number of these jobs over the last decade, but […]

Joshua Archambault

Cart Before the Horse in Media Coverage of Massachusetts Payment Reform

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Before digging into the Senate bill this afternoon, I wanted to express my concern about early media coverage of the payment reform debate. The spotlight has become focused on 3 or 4 points, all contained in press releases. No one can knowledgably comment on the Senate bill since they have not seen the full language- as they are still finalizing parts of it this morning. It is easy to say the two bills look the same from the press release, but are they? The debate over somewhat arbitrary cost growth goals is pointless, unless there is a debate about the mechanisms to get there. Did we forget that DHCFP data tells us 53% of employers are self-insured in our state […]

Jim Stergios

Not grateful about “charter cap lift”

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The 2010 Achievement Gap bill that was passed by both the House and the Senate and signed into law by Governor Patrick lifted the limits on charter schools and the number of students in them in districts that were failing to see improvements in student achievement. Rather than limiting the number of students to 9% in these largely urban districts, the law allowed up to 18% of students to attend charter schools. The six-year period for the expansion up to 18 percent of students was not coincidental. It aligns with the six-year reimbursement schedule for districts, by which districts: • receive 100% of the per-pupil funding for in the first year after a student leaves for a public charter; • […]

Joshua Archambault

I Pledge My Faith in Bureaucracy- Mass Health Reform II

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The House version of payment reform creates a new mega agency, the Division of Health Care Cost and Quality. To be fair, the House collapses a few other state agencies into the new Division, but there is no question this entity is given far-reaching and broad regulatory power. The Division will be independent and “not subject to the supervision and control of any other” public entity. (Section 29, subsection 2(a)) The controversial federal Affordable Care Act drew negative attention for how many times the Secretary of HHS was instructed to act on major policy, roughly 700 times in 2,700 pages. The House’s bill outdoes the ACA by requiring the division to take action 163 times in 178 pages, or almost […]

Jim Stergios

How are the Rural Poor Doing at School?

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Massachusetts is a wealthy place. We are among the wealthiest states in the country, and the educational attainment of Massachusetts parents is well beyond that of parents in every other state. All this should point to high-powered students and schools in the Bay State. In fact, “big thinkers” in education policy often point to those factors to explain why Massachusetts does so well on national and international assessments. In part, that’s true. But what these big thinkers fail to see is that Massachusetts not only has risen from around 11th in the country on the national assessments to number one, but also that the performance of all Massachusetts student groups has gone up. In fact, Massachusetts’ improvement in performance among […]

Joshua Archambault

Many Unanswered Questions On Payment Reform

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The next act of the Massachusetts health care reform drama is about to play out on Beacon Hill. As the same familiar characters return to the stage, the character who should be the hero of this drama, the patient, is nowhere to be found. Instead we are sitting down to a repeat performance. The language of reform is promising, but the reality of implementation remains hazy. Over the next few days I will blog on why the House of Representatives’ bill left out the patient as part of the solution. However, for now, below are just a few questions to prime the pump for this discussion and for you to consider: How will western Massachusetts comply with the state mandate […]

Steve Poftak

UMASS Law School Revisited

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I won’t bury the lede — the UMASS law school has been recommended for provisional accreditation by the ABA’s Accreditation Committee. The next step will be a consideration of that recommendation by the ABA’s Council on Legal Education. A commenter on a related post claims that the Council has always accepted the recommendation of the Committee. After receiving provisional accreditation, the school undergoes at least three years of review to move from provisional to full accreditation. That will be an ongoing challenge for the school but from the perspective of students, provisional accreditation gets them the right to take the bar in any state they want, so provisional is good enough right now. As a longtime critic of the law […]

Jim Stergios

Romney and Obama tussle on education

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So let the games begin. Finally, the presidential candidates may get to education. For the greater part of a month, the presidential candidates have been sizing each other up, jabbing each other on jobs and the economy, who’s more in touch with the average voter, and all sorts of distractions like who is waging that war on women and whether the president should play politics with foreign policy (as if that’s anything new). Given that education is a key factor affecting the country’s ability to create jobs–and that it is one of the key sectors of public employment–you would have thought that education would have made the dance card a little earlier in the process. But no. Finally, we have […]