As the health care industry transforms in the age of telehealth and rattles under staffing strains, experts point to the accountable care organization model as a growing and essential piece of the puzzle.
Jennifer Smith
Jennifer Smith writes for CommonWealth Beacon and co-hosts its weekly podcast, The Codcast. Her areas of focus include housing, social issues, courts and the law, and politics and elections. A California native who also lived in Utah, Jennifer has covered Massachusetts since 2011 for a variety of publications. She worked breaking news in the Boston Globe’s metro section and provided courtroom coverage of the Boston Marathon bomber trial for the international wire service Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) while completing her undergraduate journalism degree at Northeastern University in Boston. For four years, Jennifer was a staff writer and later news editor for the Dorchester Reporter, covering her home neighborhood and the city of Boston with a particular focus on politics and development. Her work and commentary have appeared in WBUR, GBH News, Harvard Public Health Magazine, and Politico’s Massachusetts Playbook. She has co-hosted MassINC’s Massachusetts politics and policy podcast The Horse Race since 2018, interviewing newsmakers, journalists, and elected officials across the state.
Posted inHealth Care
Second Trump term has Mass. abortion advocates on edge
Rebecca Hart Holder, the president of Reproductive Equity Now, says Massachusetts needs to brace for possible assaults from the incoming Trump administration on the state’s ability to offer services not only to its own residents but to the thousands who have turned to Massachusetts for abortions in the past two years.
Posted inEducation
Early child care system has a workforce problem
MASSACHUSETTS’ CHILD CARE system serving the state’s most vulnerable children has seen improvement in recent years, but a new report warns that issues with recruiting and keeping workers could undermine […]
Posted inMedia
CommonWealth Beacon’s new editor on public service journalism
Colarusso comes to CommonWealth after more than three years at Nieman Reports, which is the Harvard University Nieman Foundation magazine focused on the journalism industry.
Posted inPolitics
Attorney General Andrea Campbell gears up for Trump round two
ONE WEEK AFTER the 2024 presidential election results, Attorney General Andrea Campbell has a staggering legal to-do list. “I think there are many out there doing the blame game or […]
Posted inPolitics
Lessons for the Democrats from Latino cities
Days after the presidential election, Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia reflects on the pronounced shift toward Donald Trump by Latino voters.
Posted inPolitics
Lecciones para los Demócratas de las ciudades Latinas
Read in English. CON LAS ELECCIONES presidenciales todavía frescas y el alcance de una segunda administración Trump empezando a tomar forma, políticos, encuestadores y expertos buscan respuestas. En las autopsias […]
Posted inCourts
SJC: $70,000 engagement ring must be returned to giver if wedding called off
“We now join the modern trend adopted by the majority of jurisdictions that have considered the issue and retire the concept of fault in this context; where, as here, the planned wedding does not ensue and the engagement is ended, the engagement ring must be returned to the donor regardless of fault,” Justice Dalila Wendlandt wrote for a unanimous court.
Posted inPolitics
Cracks form in Mass. Democratic strongholds, led by heavily Latino cities and towns
Vice President Kamala Harris, who carried the state and its 11 electoral votes by 61.3 percent to President-elect Donald Trump’s 36.5 percent, not only won Massachusetts by a smaller margin than her Democratic predecessors. She won almost every single town by less, a sign that the Democratic coalition is weakening even in its strongholds.
Posted inPolitics
Looming second Trump term dawns on Mass.
The first Trump administration and its fallout was marked, in Massachusetts, by a scramble to shore up protections for marginalized groups and double down on commitments to Democratic priorities that looked imperiled. Trump’s next term could be even rockier for the Bay State.
Posted inBallot Questions
Five ballot questions all have a workplace connection
The CommonWealth Beacon newsroom discussed the ballot sla.te this week on a special pre-Election Day episode of The Codcast. Some highlights of the conversation follow
Posted inPolitics
New BU study touts immigration as essential to Mass. economy
WITH THE ECONOMIC and infrastructural strains of immigration a top concern nationally and in Massachusetts, a new study from Boston University offers a data-focused counterpoint. Immigrants are not only essential […]
Posted inHealth Care
Senate leader says Mass. health care ‘incredibly fragile right now’
“If you look at all of our hospitals, even our historically financially secure ones, all of them are struggling,” said Sen. Cindy Friedman, the Senate chair of the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing. “All of our community health centers are struggling. And I don’t mean just that we’re trying to clean up little pockets here and there. They are really struggling. The cost of health care is just beyond what anyone I think had envisioned it would be, especially since Covid. So nobody’s on great footing.”
Posted inCourts
Tracking cookies doesn’t violate wiretap law, SJC rules
The 1960s-era Wiretap Act prohibits covertly intercepting communications, but the majority of Supreme Judicial Court justices concluded Thursday that use of popular AdTech tools that monitored a Revere resident’s browsing on the New England Baptist Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center websites doesn’t fall under that definition.
Posted inHealth
Tobacco-free movement takes aim at access to nicotine pouches
Some municipal boards of health, like those in Greenfield and Groton, are floating an “out of sight, out of mind” tactic, restricting certain nicotine product sales to adult-only retail tobacco stores and sparking the ire of retail associations.
Posted inMedia
In Melrose, an experiment in hyper-local AI podcasting
Catalini sighs describing the Melrose news options over the 25 years since he moved with his wife to the city, which felt “robust” at the time. Now, almost nobody is covering hyper-local news like override votes or digging into the overwhelming documentation around proposed zoning policy, he said.
Posted inHousing
Lawmakers say they meant for MBTA Communities law to have teeth
“What I found interesting was what the case was not about,” zoning expert and consultant Amy Dain said on The Codcast. “The justices and the lawyers in the courtroom were not debating whether there’s a housing crisis. “
Posted inCourts
Post-Bruen decision, everyone has to be a gun-law historian
The decision has opened almost all aspects of the state’s gun safety law regime to challenge and sent lawyers scrambling for history books. As recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decisions have shown, if a policy is not tied to a founding-era law or practice – a so-called historical analogue – it likely will not survive judicial scrutiny.
Posted inEnergy
New report banks on philanthropists to supercharge energy retrofits
A new report from the Boston Foundation aims to convince philanthropic donors to put money toward retrofitting smaller residential buildings in Boston to reduce their carbon emissions.
Posted inHousing
SJC raises questions about MBTA Communities Act penalties
There seemed to be a mixed reception to the arguments on Monday, with some justices inclined to parse legal minutiae that could support a narrow ruling on technical grounds. Others appeared compelled by a broader public policy argument that could allow wide latitude for the state to enforce laws designed to address the crippling housing shortage.
Posted inEnvironment
Echoes of Helene flooding in Massachusetts climate planning
HURRICANE HELENE’S destructive path through the south, flooding inland areas considered to be sanctuaries from the impact of serious weather and climate events, shocked the country with the scale of […]
Posted inGambling
Long-stalled gambling data project moves forward
Massachusetts gaming regulators are moving forward with a data collection project – mandated by a 2011 statute – dealing with problem gambling that’s been on ice for almost a decade because of industry and pandemic delays.