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Not Like The Other

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In general, good manners are to be respected. But our dear friends in the business community are overdoing it. In the ongoing debate over municipal healthcare costs, there are now three competing proposals on the table, the Governor’s, the House, and the Senate. The Governor’s effort is largely a bunt — signaling a desire to get communities into GIC or give them control over plan design but pushing the details off onto the regulatory process. The House is much clearer — communities can adjust plan design up to the equivalent of the biggest plan for state workers or enter GIC, so long as 10% of first year savings is returned to workers. The Senate takes a different approach — communities […]

Is Medicaid (MassHealth) Preventing the Poor from Breaking out of Addiction?

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Lawrence Harmon of The Boston Globe had a very interesting article that highlights the intersection of medicine and public policy. The issue was the debate whether MassHealth, our state’s Medicaid program, should move to pay for Suboxone versus methodone for opioid-addicted patients (for example heroin addicts). The article examines the growing medical evidence of the clinical effectiveness of Suboxone and the benefits versus commonly utilized methadone. I suggest you read the whole article for yourself to get the full medical discussion of the upsides of Suboxone versus methodone, but here are the sections I found most interesting on the public policy front: In 2007, MassHealth paid $325 million to treat 18,000 low-income addicts with either methadone or Suboxone, according to […]

(Almost) Everything You Wanted to Know About the MBTA

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[WARNING: Hard-core transportation nerdiness ahead. Consider yourself warned.] As a user of the MBTA and a fan of transit (no, really), there’s no better place to learn about the minutiae of the system than the T’s Blue Book. It tells you everything (well, almost) you could want to know about the system. Within its pages, you find stuff like: • Most heavily used subway line? Red Line at 74.45m trips per year, which narrowly edges out the Green Line. And the Blue Line lags way behind at 17.88m trips per year. • Most popular station? Downtown Crossing, with 22,880 entries and transfers on a typical weekday. Least popular? Suffolk Downs, with only 794. • Who’s on the bus? The T […]

Tuesday Quick Hits

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– Holub out? I haven’t followed it closely but the Globe suggests that UMASS-Amherst Chancellor Holub is on his way out after just three years. One of the data points the article refers to is a survey of professors that shows dissatisfaction with the Chancellor. Its not entirely clear but the survey appears to be one of those on-line, opt-in surveys, not a scientific sampling. So that means approximately 100 (self-selected?) respondents (out of 1000+ faculty members) are responsible for the failing grade given to Holub. – Referee Needed. The Patrick Administration is claiming big $$$ savings from the opening of the automobile insurance market to competition. (A view I agree with and a stance for which the Governor does […]

The Soft Cost of Doing Business In Massachusetts?

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If you talk with business leaders, you hear stories about the hidden costs of doing business in Massachusetts – huge building projects idled by recalcitrant local building inspectors, regulators blithely ignoring legitimate concerns raised by companies, and a general lack of understanding of how businesses work. I’ve always wanted to quantify these ‘soft costs’ to see if they amounted to much, or were just so much complaining. As I compiled information for my last post on business rankings, one pattern in the data caught my eye. If you look at Massachusetts strictly by the taxation and business cost numbers, we come out in the mid-30s. This year, we were ranked 32nd for tax climate by the Tax Foundation and 39th […]