A misleading picture of Massachusetts health-care reform

Using her full arsenal of conservative buzzwords, Sally C. Pipes once again turned to scare tactics to attack health reform [“Obamacare, Part II,” op-ed, March 24]. She painted the Massachusetts governor’s legislative initiative to promote better value for the health-care dollar in Massachusetts as a move to a single-payer system, HMOs and rationing — all rolled into one. But Ms. Pipes missed the fundamental non-ideological facts: Payment reform is essential to improve the quality of health care and to lower costs. 

Patients don’t benefit from a hospital stay that good primary care could prevent; from unnecessary repeats of invasive, costly tests; or from being sent back to the hospital because of a medical error or a failure to ensure follow-up care. Doctors and hospitals shouldn’t benefit, either. Rather, they should be held accountable for collaborating with each other and with us as patients to coordinate and deliver quality care. And their financial benefits should depend on doing just that. Not, as they depend today, on simply delivering more (and more costly) services without talking to each other, let alone their patients. 

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

Judy Feder, Washington

The writer is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

l

 Sally C. Pipes’s opined from San Francisco that Massachusetts’s health-care reform is causing out-of-control spending and that the commonwealth is dragging people against their will into managed-care plans. On the contrary, well before health-care reform, the state led the nation in managed-care enrollment, including state government employees.

In fact, most of Massachusetts’s citizens are covered through nonprofit health plans ranked highest in the nation for quality and customer service. Moreover, it was wrong to declare that costs have been accelerated due to health-care reform. Rather, the implementation of this public policy moved the conversation, led by Gov. Deval Patrick, from access to care to one focused on finding solutions for cost containment and improved quality, and that is good for everyone.

James Roosevelt Jr., Watertown, Mass.

Paul Guzzi, Boston

The writers are, respectively, president and CEO of Tufts Health Plan and president and CEO of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.