Despite all of the health care advances over the last century, we are actually losing ground on important measures of population health.
Health Care
Posted inOpinion
Career path crumbling for mental health clinicians
In recent years, as reimbursement rates fell further behind, outpatient clinics lost staff to acute and psychiatric hospitals, primary care practices, schools, and state agencies. These settings can offer significantly better salaries, benefits, and work-life balance. They have become the proverbial greener pastures that not everyone can afford to resist.
Posted inOpinion
Panelists who impressed at health cost trends hearing
The Health Policy Commission’s annual cost trends hearing didn’t attract much media coverage this year, so I thought I’d summarize what I thought was most interesting.
Posted inHealth Care
Senate pushing again for drug pricing legislation
The Senate is preparing to take up drug pricing legislation that would also create a licensing process for pharmacy benefit managers.
Posted inOpinion
Pharmacy benefit managers are engaging in thievery
Pharmacy benefit managers were created with the intention they would negotiate discounts and pass them on to patients. Instead, they’ve taken advantage of not being regulated using several tactics to reap profits, sometimes in the billions.
Posted inOpinion
SJC case raises interesting questions about tenure
Can Tufts Medical School cut the pay of tenured professors who fail to reach targets for outside fundraising? The Supreme Judicial Court will decide.
Posted inOpinion
Advice from 2 mothers whose children died from meningitis
AS MOTHERS who have both lost a child, we often say we’re in a club that we want no one else to ever join. We started our individual foundations and the Meningitis B Action Project after we each lost our young, healthy daughters too soon to a now vaccine-preventable disease, Meningitis B. Kimberly (Patti’s daughter), […]
Posted inHealth Care
PBMs aren’t the pharmacy boogeyman
LET’S START with something that we can all agree with: the rising cost of health care in Massachusetts and the entire country is a crisis that threatens not only the viability of our small and large businesses, but our economy as a whole. It’s a problem that cannot continue if we’re to prosper and provide […]
Posted inOpinion
Could Dana-Farber deal reduce health care spending?
EVERYONE IS TALKING about the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s decision to abandon its long-term affiliation with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and partner instead with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is offering the institute the opportunity to build a much larger free-standing cancer care hospital on the Beth Israel campus. It’s a really big deal, raising […]
Posted inOpinion
Radical change needed to address physician shortage
THE UNITED STATES is facing a severe shortage of physicians in the coming years – a crisis that could push our already fractured health care system beyond the brink. A comprehensive report by the Association of American Medical Colleges concluded that by the year 2034, our nation will be short more than 120,000 physicians. Given […]