Just over a month ago, Governor Patrick unveiled his budget for Fiscal Year 2009, which makes targeted investments in health care reform and primary care initiatives, as well as education; public safety; job creation; and partnerships with cities and towns.
Health care reform will not succeed with insurance reforms alone, and investing in health care reform and primary care are key priorities for the Patrick Administration. We must promote policies that ensure that people have the right care in the right place. Massachusetts must receive the best value from health care expenditures, while ensuring health care is safe, timely, efficient, effective, equitable and patient-centered.
We continue to support the goal of near-universal coverage, and the first year of this innovative program has been a success. More than 300,000 people who were uninsured now have health coverage. Yet even beyond continuing to support expanded coverage through Commonwealth Care and MassHealth, there is other important work to do. We need to focus more attention on health care costs and improved access to primary care services for all people in Massachusetts. Several initiatives in the Governor’s budget reflect these goals.
For example, we propose expanding pay-for-performance programs in MassHealth by extending performance based reimbursement to MCOs, nursing homes and primary care physicians. Implemented in a way that rewards health outcomes, pay-for-performance represents a shift away from a straight fee-for-service model that does not recognize the quality of care provided.
Expansion of chronic care management, focusing on the small percentage of patients who account for the majority of costs in the health care system, can improve care while decreasing costs through preventing avoidable hospital admissions, readmissions, and unnecessary emergency department visits. The Governor’s budget supports this, especially for MassHealth Primary Care Clinician Plan members. We are committed to supporting primary care physicians’ efforts to provide the type of care they want to provide for their patients in their practices by supporting a team approach to care management. As we move forward with the HealthyMass initiative, we plan to coordinate models to support a medical home across public payers.
Access to primary care is also a growing concern in the Commonwealth. Our budget includes $1.7 million to continue to support the Primary Care Workforce Development and Loan Forgiveness Grant program. This program enhances the recruitment and retention of primary care physicians at community health centers. In FY09, the Governor proposes to expand eligibility for this initiative to include primary care physicians recruited by community hospitals.
These are some of the many exciting and important health care reform initiatives supported in the Governor’s budget. We make recommendations that will maintain the expanded coverage enacted by Chapter 58, while also focusing on other areas that require improvement. These reforms are necessary to ensure the health of the Commonwealth.
JudyAnn Bigby, M.D.
Secretary for Health and Human Services
Interesting update discussing many broad initiatives; thank you. The devils’ in the details, though, as is the case regarding the cost to state taxpayers to purchase an insurance policy for the over 300,000 newly insured residents under the Chapter 58/mandated health insurance law..
Could you or Cabinet Secretary Leslie Kirwin please provide the public, here on this public forum site, with a detailed breakdown of how the $687 Million in new state dollars have been spent this fiscal year on the mandated health insurance law?
As Secretary Bigby says: “Massachusetts must receive the best value from health care expenditures”. Taxpayers and voters heartily agree with this statement. The public needs to better understand how this goal of value-driven health reform is being realized by Governor Patrick and others in his administration.
Providing state projections of monies to be collected through the Department of Revenue (Tax Dept) from fines on the uininsured who cannot afford to purchase private insurance policy and “comply with the mandate” is a detail that the public also has a right to know.
Thank you in advance for providing information that is necessary for the public to be fully engaged in Massachusetts health reform.
Let’s not forget that Patrick’s budget proposal stands on a shaky house of cards. His budget anticipates $300 million from speculative casino revenue.
[...] good news is that people are seizing the moment. Last week in this blog, Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. JudyAnn Bigby wrote “that we must promote policies [...]
How can you claim success when there are at least 300,000 residents currently paying penalties because they couldn’t afford to purchase insurance while these penalties support those who get the insurance for free and the penalty-payers can’t pay their bills and still have no insurance?
The number of penalty-payers will increase as the cost of living continues to skyrocket while incomes remain stagnant and residents are forced to drop coverage in order to heat and eat. Those who cannot afford to upgrade their policies to meet minimum creditable coverage will also end up paying penalties and have no insurance.
You and your crowd, including Mr. “Together We Can” Deval Patrick, just keep on spinning the victory propaganda chatting about how you are going to prop up this failing scam while people are struggling to survive.
This mess is a Ponzi scheme built on money you never had and haven’t received. Increasing cigarette taxes and slumming up MA with casinos is not going to keep this failing policy going. The best thing that could happen at this point is that you lose the waiver before too many more hard-working taxpayers are hurt.
How dare you refer to this as health care reform? It has nothing to do with health care and the definition of reform is “to make changes for improvement in order to remove abuse and injustices.” This law is punitive and wasteful and is an assault on low-to-middle income residents.