Tag Archive for: Healthcare

MBTAAnalysis: A look inside the MBTA

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The MBTA shuttles over a million passengers a day around Greater…

The Clock is Ticking…….

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The clock is ticking towards December 30, 2017.  As part of…

Pioneer Institute: 340B Hospitals Does Not Necessarily Translate to Charity Care

Review of Becker’s List of Health Systems with Strong Finances…

Average Weekly Wages of Healthcare Workers Across a Decade

From 2012-22 the healthcare and social assistance sector has seen the smallest growth in average weekly wages of any large industry in Massachusetts. This potentially has dire consequences on the employment crisis that this industry already faces.

Transformative Medical Therapy Will Require New Cost-Benefit and Pricing Models

Current regulations increase development and manufacturing costs,…

Boston Children’s, MGH Among Massachusetts Hospitals with Highest Relative Commercial Prices

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.

Telehealth Progress Slowed in 2023

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.

‘High’ U.S. Drug Prices Mask Freeloading by Other Nations

The drug company’s choice is to walk away from millions in revenue from a given country and deny their people a lifesaving drug, or swallow hard and accept an unfair price that is nowhere near the drug’s value. For the sake of shareholders and patients, drug companies typically accept the unfair price and devote the revenue to offsetting their previous investments. In short, other nations are freeloading off of American R&D.

Ruining Research Rewards: Price Controls Come for University Patents and Products

Joe Selvaggi talks with Pioneer Institute Senior Fellow Dr. Bill Smith about the benefit of the Bayh-Dole Act’s protection of intellectual property rights for university research patents and the risk posed to the nation and the local economy from recent efforts to consider price controls on products developed from patented discoveries.

Sabotaging Strategic Success: How Price Controls Could Imperil U.S. Pharma Industry

Joe Selvaggi talks with Pioneer Institute’s Director of Life Sciences Initiative Dr. Bill Smith about the policies that drove biopharmaceutical company from Europe to the U.S., and how proposed, similar price controls in President Biden’s Fair Prices Act could distort incentives away from innovation and threaten the success of a thriving and vital U.S. industry.

Baking Young Minds: Scientific Concerns for Cannabis on Kids

Joe Selvaggi talks with professor of psychiatry Dr. Ryan Sultan about the findings of his recently released study on the effects of cannabis on the mental health of American adolescents. Dr. Sultan’s work shows a substantial correlation between cannabis use and negative mental health outcomes.

Curing Medicaid’s Cold: Unwinding Pandemic Expansion Before Federal Funds End

Joe Selvaggi talks with healthcare policy expert Dr. Brian Blase about Medicaid expansion during the COVID-19 healthcare emergency and how states can efficiently reexamine eligibility criteria so as to protect the vulnerable before federal support expires.

Opinion: Legislature should act on bill to limit out-of-pocket drug costs

S. 609, a bill that would limit out-of-pocket costs for patients paying for prescription drugs, is a clear step in the right direction. Massachusetts should join 16 other states that have passed similar bills to protect patients.

Healthcare: Suffolk County’s Biggest Driver for Labor and Employment

Suffolk County employment and labor trends have seen steady growth over the past 15 years. The rise of establishments and employment in the health care sector has directly contributed to these trends. Suffolk County has now surpassed Worcester and Essex counties in labor force and employment numbers.

Picking Patients’ Pockets: Exposing Insurance Schemes Targeting Orphan Diseases

Joe Selvaggi talks with Pioneer Institute’s senior Health Care Fellows Dr. Bill Smith and Dr. Robert Popovian about their white paper "Out-of-Pocket Pirates: Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) and the Confiscation of Out-of-Pocket Assistance Programs." This episode explores what consumers and regulators can do to ensure those with rare diseases are not left without assistance.

Opinion: Drug patents aren’t a ‘necessary evil.’ They save lives.

Drug patents are one of the most important public policy innovations in all of human history, and a boon to patients awaiting cures. Inventions only come when inventors are rewarded, not punished. Patents are not a “necessary evil.”

Study: High List Prices and Deep Discounts for Prescription Drugs Hurt Poor and Sick Patients

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.

Massachusetts’ Misguided Middle-Class Health Insurance Subsidy Expansion

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.

Rationing Vital Therapies: Should Healthcare Experts Decide Who Lives?

Joe Selvaggi talks with senior health care fellow Dr. William Smith about his new book Rationing Medicine: Threats From European Cost Effectiveness Models to Seniors and Other Vulnerable Populations, and the book’s cautionary warning against embracing European standards for valuing life saving therapies.

Study: Massachusetts Should Join 45 States and Allow Prescribers to Dispense Medications

A Pioneer Institute study shows that middlemen—commercial pharmacies and pharmacy benefit managers—add substantial costs over wholesale prices. Allowing prescribers to dispense routine drugs would save consumers money without compromising safety.

Accessing Healthcare Anywhere: Lessons For Liberalizing Telehealth

Joe Selvaggi talks with Josh Archambault about the benefits of state policies to enable interstate telehealth that empowers patients to reach their healthcare professionals in other states, and for providers to offer service anywhere they are needed.

As COVID-19 Emergencies Ease, Some Progress on Telehealth Rules

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. The report highlights telehealth policy best practices for states.

Where Are All the Workers?

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Labor shortages are front and center once again this holiday…

Survey Finds Spotty Compliance Among Hospitals with Federal Price Transparency Law

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.

Massachusetts Hospitals: Uneven Compliance with New Federal Price Transparency Law

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.

Right To Save: Paying Healthcare Consumers To Shop For Value

This week on Hubwonk, host Joe Selvaggi talks with healthcare policy expert Josh Archambault about the findings from his Cicero Institute report, The Right to Save: The Next Generation of Price Transparency. He outlines how to incentivize healthcare consumers to utilize price information to reduce out-of-pocket costs, and lower healthcare costs for everyone.

Healthcare dominates the job market.

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Healthcare and social assistance are among the most important…
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Healthcare Employs More on Cape Cod Than Any Other Sector

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Despite being a major tourist destination, the largest employment sector on Cape Cod is not related to tourism: it is healthcare!

Exploiting Charity Drugs: Hospital Program Earns Billions But Forgets Mission

Hubwonk host Joe Selvaggi talks with Pioneer Institute’s Dr. Bill Smith about his recently released paper entitled, "340B Drug Discounts, An Increasingly Dysfunctional Federal Program," which analyzes the evolution of a well-intentioned program to offer discounted drugs to the uninsured from a benefit that had helped charitable hospitals to one that has exploded to generate billions in profits while serving fewer uninsured.

Massachusetts Telehealth Report Card: Are We Embracing Disruption for Better Quality of Care?

Hubwonk host Joe Selvaggi talks with Pioneer Senior Fellow in Healthcare Josh Archambault about his newest research paper, produced with the Cicero Institute and the Reason Foundation, on states' success in implementing telehealth to improve healthcare outcomes. They discuss how Massachusetts has used remote medicine to better reach patients and serve their needs.

Building Healthcare Bigger: New Bill Is Good Medicine or Ill-Designed Cost Shift

This week on Hubwonk, host Joe Selvaggi talks with Josh Archambault, Pioneer Institute’s Senior Fellow in Healthcare, about the healthcare provisions in the pending Build Back Better Act and their likely impact on the coverage and cost to Americans in the wake of Covid-19.

A Closer Look at the Healthcare and Social Assistance Industry in Massachusetts

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From 2001 to 2019, far more employees worked in healthcare and…