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How to cut health insurance costs by 18%

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Got your attention? The State has put a wealth of disclosure from health insurers and providers up on the web. I lack the time and, frankly, the chops to really get at all the good stuff but I did find a few interesting pieces of disclosure. In Partners’s disclosure, they note the rates they charge insurers could have been 18% lower in 2008, if government funded programs had covered their costs. (Yes, I am naively assuming that the insurers would pass that savings along to consumers.) Put another way, Partners had negative operating margins of -33% on Medicare and -44% on Medicaid in 2009. Also, floating around in the ether around the federal health care reform debate is a proposal […]

A big question on Lawrence

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The Senate is hard at work on its version of a rescue package for the city of Lawrence. Most people expect something quite a bit more directive – more power for an overseer – than what the House did, which was, to be blunt, irresponsible to the City and to the residents of the state. I have to wonder how we got here. Sure, there are the charter issues, and the Senate would do a great service to all by insisting that the city council and the mayor, as a condition of the line of credit, revoke the entirety of Section 3.7 of the city’s charter, which ties the executive’s hands on department heads. Essentially the city council has to […]

Let me rise

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Listen to Juan Williams on the DC Scholarship program. Folks, we have to do something about this. From Virginia Walden at DC Parents for School Choice: Sens. Lieberman (I-CT), Collins (R-ME), Feinstein (D-CA), Voinovich (R-OH), Byrd (D-WV), and Ensign (R-NV) have sponsored a bipartisan amendment that would save the successful D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) – a program that has been an educational lifeline for more than 3,330 children from very low-income District of Columbia families. Despite assuring Senate supporters of OSP more than a year ago that they would have floor time to offer their reauthorization legislation, the Senators have not been allowed a vote on this program. Yesterday, after the Lieberman amendment was filed, all Senators received threatening […]

Senator Brian Joyce is right

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The Herald has a piece today on Senator Joyce getting flak from various Milton residents about his proposal to put the rink out for a long-term lease. Residents are concerned about cost and availability. They should read our case study of what happened after the state put some (the former DEM) rinks out to lease in the mid-90s: More availability, greater capital investment, increased attendance, and continued affordability. This is not the first time that Senator Joyce has stuck his neck out at some risk in his own district to do the right thing. Careful readers of this space will note we lauded him previously for supporting the privatization of the Ponkapoag golf course.

Headquarters and Jobs

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If you had a chance to read Steve Syre in the Globe this morning, you know about our latest piece of research. We continue our examination of job creation in Massachusetts by taking a look at how headquarters employment has changed. And the news is not good. Our report, Heading Down: The Loss of Massachusetts Headquarters, details stunning job losses. On a net basis, employment at headquarters is down by over 250,000 jobs. The biggest single driver of this is contraction of headquarters, which cost close to 730,000 jobs. The next biggest driver is the closure of headquarters, which accounts for 440,000+ job losses. A particular issue with headquarters ‘deaths’ is that headquarter births are not coming close to balancing […]