Julie Donnelly at the Boston Business Journal graciously offers a mea culpa for a factual error in her recent column. Recall that the thrust of the column was that Partners Healthcare System was only making its primary care doctors available to subsidized insurance products at its affiliated Neighborhood Health Plan. She now corrects this:
It is the insurers, and not Partners HealthCare, that are limiting access to doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The reason is simple: the doctors are too expensive for most of the plans that are set to offer ObamaCare plans on the Health Connector.
Brava to Julie for admitting the error, but also brava for pointing out that an underlying problem exists: The excessive rates charged by PHS for its physicians.
In my commentary on the situation as Julie first described it, I wondered how the kind of self-dealing indicated by her story could take place. I also wondered what state agency would have jurisdiction over such matters.
The same issue remains. Let's think it through. How is it possible that NHP can afford to include the PHS doctors in its Obamacare subsidized health plan, but other insurers cannot? There are two possibilities. One is that PHS has offered those doctors to NHP at a discount, a discount that is not being offered to other insurers.
The other possibility is that NHP is taking a loss on these plans, covered by the huge resources available to PHS generally. This would permit NHP to gain market share relative to other insurers, in essence subsidized by the excessive rates paid by all insurers to PHS.
In either case, we again have the self-dealing issue, just in another form.
So, Julie, your mea culpa is thoughtful, and I predict that you will not let up on the importance of the underlying issue of this system's market power and ability to transfer costs and revenues to suit its overall corporate purpose.
It is the insurers, and not Partners HealthCare, that are limiting access to doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The reason is simple: the doctors are too expensive for most of the plans that are set to offer ObamaCare plans on the Health Connector.
Brava to Julie for admitting the error, but also brava for pointing out that an underlying problem exists: The excessive rates charged by PHS for its physicians.
In my commentary on the situation as Julie first described it, I wondered how the kind of self-dealing indicated by her story could take place. I also wondered what state agency would have jurisdiction over such matters.
The same issue remains. Let's think it through. How is it possible that NHP can afford to include the PHS doctors in its Obamacare subsidized health plan, but other insurers cannot? There are two possibilities. One is that PHS has offered those doctors to NHP at a discount, a discount that is not being offered to other insurers.
The other possibility is that NHP is taking a loss on these plans, covered by the huge resources available to PHS generally. This would permit NHP to gain market share relative to other insurers, in essence subsidized by the excessive rates paid by all insurers to PHS.
In either case, we again have the self-dealing issue, just in another form.
So, Julie, your mea culpa is thoughtful, and I predict that you will not let up on the importance of the underlying issue of this system's market power and ability to transfer costs and revenues to suit its overall corporate purpose.
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