Mario Motta, M.D. a Salem cardiologist and president of the Massachusetts Medical Society says a new proposal that aims to make health insurance more affordable for small businesses could bankrupt physicians and is merely a cynical attempt by insurers to avoid reigning in premiums and profits:
The latest proposal to improve our state’s health care reform effort offers no improvement at all. In fact, it’s detrimental to physicians and hospitals – and thus to patients.
This week I testified at a hastily scheduled hearing for Senate Bill 2170, filed on behalf of the Massachusetts Association of Health Plans, which would create a new kind of a health insurance plan, ostensibly to make health insurance more affordable for small business owners.
But it’s actually a cynical attempt by the health insurance industry to focus cost-cutting efforts on the state’s health care providers and away from insurance premiums. Providers who have participated willingly and enthusiastically in all of the state’s health care reform efforts to date deserve better.
Insurers now want to force physicians to participate in a health insurance product totally of their own design and whose reimbursement levels could bankrupt many physician practices.
If we don’t want to participate in these private plans but still want to serve our patients with other insurance, we should be able to do so. This bill would prohibit that. Likewise, it is completely unacceptable to force physicians into accepting a level of reimbursement and prohibit them from balance billing the difference as a condition of professional licensure. Not even Medicare and Medicaid have such a requirement.
Worse, the bill does not hold the insurance industry accountable in any meaningful way for passing along any savings to their customers. In essence, insurers control their costs and have no limits on their premiums and profits. Health plans have been increasing their rates to their customers for the last couple of years. What part of these double-digit annual increases went to cover increased provider costs? In some cases, nothing. You can read more of our objections to this ill-conceived bill here.
We’re not the problem. We’re part of the solution. Physicians overwhelmingly support state health reform by a 10 to 1 margin, and are doing everything in their practices every day to make it work. Even if you froze physician reimbursement rates for many years, the cost problem would not go away. There are many factors at play. The Health Care Quality and Cost Council recognizes that fact with its Roadmap to Cost Containment, as does Governor Patrick, who recently proposed a multi-step plan to address small business health care costs.
I absolutely recognize that small businesses are under a lot of pressure, especially during these difficult times. As a small business owner myself, I feel the same pressures.
But the bill heard by the Legislature this week, Senate 2170, is not the answer. Its simplistic, cynical approach will actually worsen our primary care shortage, reduce patients’ access to care, and alienate the very providers who have to make our health reform effort succeed.
The bill is absolutely ill-conceived. I’d note that it also shifts costs to consumers by making the lower provider rates available only in a plan with a very high deductible, and to large employers, whose premiums will go up because of cost-shifting. If there ever was a clear admission by health plans that they can’t do anything to truly control costs, this is it. It’s time to declare defeat in our attempts to control health care costs through health plan contracting and competition among plans and start getting serious about using government to deal with rising health spending.
So glad I left Massachusetts. You couldn’t pay me enough to come back and practice medicine in the Peoples Republic of Taxachusetts.
Utter rubbish. Health insurance is expensive because health care is expensive. 90% of our state’s insureds are covered by not-for-profits like Blue Cross. And they pass nearly 90% of the premiums they collect through to the providers. It’s stunning that the richest class of people in America – physicians – can make these arguments with a straight face.
[...] Keeping health care affordable is the challenge facing all of us in the health care system and we recognize that rising health care costs have fallen particularly hard on small businesses and their employees. But as the chairs of the Health Care Financing Committee asked members of the Massachusetts Medical Society and other providers that testified at Monday’s hearing of Senate Bill 2170, “If not this, then what’s your solution?” We haven’t seen any proposal from the Mass. Medical Society to help small businesses. (See the MMS post on SB 2170 here.) [...]