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 […]

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 […]