Health Care

Boston, Mass – A new report from the Cicero Institute and Pioneer Institute finds that while state legislatures remained active on telehealth policy in 2025, most states made only incremental progress toward modern, patient-centered telehealth systems. With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill and its $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program, states now face growing pressure to modernize outdated telehealth laws or risk falling behind in access, affordability, and federal funding competitiveness.

Los Angeles (Jan. 5, 2022) — A new report from Reason Foundation, Cicero Institute and Pioneer Institute rates every state’s telehealth policy for patient access and ease of providing virtual care.

Review of Becker’s List of Health Systems with Strong Finances finds  more transparency needed in hospitals that receive federal aid to improve access to care. (Boston, Mass) – Pioneer Institute of Public Policy Research today released a paper that found that higher...

With only weeks left in the Massachusetts legislative calendar, there are once again hundreds of proposed bills left for the legislature to deal with.  This means lots of backroom talks and deals will be required for the legislature to complete its work...

Pioneer Institute's new tool, the Massachusetts Hospital Relative Price Tracker, displays relative price and facilitates relative price comparisons among hospitals. The average price among all hospitals will have a relative price of 1.0. A relative price of 1.5 means that a hospital charges 50 percent higher than the average of all Massachusetts hospitals. Similarly, a relative price of 0.84 means that a hospital’s prices are 16 percent below average. Relative price data is collected and reported by the Commonwealth’s Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA) and is an aggregate measure used to evaluate price variations among different hospitals. It is recalculated annually based on data collected from commercial payers and includes information on private commercial insurance and commercially managed public insurance products such as Medicare Advantage and Medicaid Managed Organizations/Accountable Care Partnership Plans.

The reality is that non-price factors, including several players, are causing net prices to decline and retail prices to increase. Those players include employers, health plans, and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), all of whom have continuously circumvented the system through loopholes and complicated systems of reimbursement that tend to hurt patients

A new report by Cicero Institute, Pioneer Institute, and Reason Foundation reveals worrying stagnation in state-level telehealth expansion efforts in 2023, with only a few exceptions. Progress made during the pandemic is being lost even as provider shortages worsen, raising concerns about patients’ access to care.

A new Pioneer Institute study illustrates how the current system of drug pricing and discounts leads to patients with challenging diseases being charged huge out-of-pocket sums to keep other premiums low, effectively imposing financial penalties on the sick to protect the healthy and wealthy.

A proposal on Beacon Hill to expand insurance subsidies up to 500 percent of the federal poverty level, could push the small business insurance market into a death spiral, without reducing the number of uninsured and hurting those with preexisting conditions.

A 2019 federal law requires hospitals to make prices for 300 shoppable services available online in a “consumer-friendly format,” but a Pioneer Institute survey of 19 hospitals finds that information on discounted cash prices—the price most likely to be charged to consumers paying out of pocket—was unavailable at seven of those hospitals.