<p>njmom, I suggest you take a look at what private insurers would charge your parents for the same coverage.</p>
<p>I listened to part of a financial show on the radio this morning and they were discussing the Partners Healthcare buyout of a South Shore hospital in the Boston area. The discussion was on who likes and doesn’t like universal healthcare in MA. The expert said that hospitals like it because they are getting paid. The insurers like it too but are pressing the hospitals on costs. So the hospitals are bulking up to achieve economies of scale along with additional choices for customers. Customers don’t like the higher costs.</p>
<p>I think that those that work for big companies that are highly profitable don’t really see that much of a change from before universal.</p>
<p>^^^truth^^^</p>
<p>Wait…hospitals are merging?</p>
<p>Is that a question or sarcasm? lol</p>
<p>It’s a question… :)</p>
<p>have seen several recently, and a hospital that went bankrupt, is being reopened by a former competitor…Mergers, or take-unders,lol, are usually the result of both places being in poor financial straits,with one being a tad more solvent…</p>
<p>Sometimes…</p>
<p>Sometimes mergers take place for market share…or monopoly power…</p>
<p>If mergers are occuring…customers may have fewer choices and prices go up…</p>
<p>What is Partners Heathcare?</p>
<p>Hospitals are merging for economies of scale given pricing pressure from insurers and to provide existing customers with more choices and coverage areas. I imagine that the ultra-low interest-rate environment is conducive to this.</p>
<p>Partners HealthCare is a not-for-profit, integrated health care system in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital – two of the nation’s leading academic medical centers – Partners HealthCare includes community and specialty hospitals, a physician network, community health centers, home care and other health related services.</p>
<p>Partners is committed to the community, and dedicated to enhancing patient care, teaching, and research in service to our patients and their families</p>
<p>Partners is the largest private employer in Massachusetts, with more than 50,000 employees, including physicians, nurses, scientists, and caregivers. With a combined research budget of more than $1 billion, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) are the largest private hospital recipients of National Institutes of Health funding in the nation.</p>
<p>Partners offers one of the most robust and competitive medical educational programs in the country, with more than 200 residency and fellowship programs, where physicians-in-training routinely rotate among academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals. </p>
<p>Partners maintains a strong commitment to the community. Through outreach programs and philanthropic initiatives, Partners and its hospitals are committed to improving the delivery of care locally and globally.</p>
<p>Partners, the largest hospital and physicians organization in Massachusetts, has kept largely on the sidelines during a wave of consolidation that has swept through the states health care industry over the past 18 months. The mergers leave fewer competitors, but also have resulted in better coordinated health care, with smaller community hospitals referring more complex procedures to their affiliated academic medical centers.</p>
<p>One factor inhibiting Partners has been the scrutiny of regulators in the office of state Attorney General Martha Coakley, who has identified Partners hospitals as among Massachusetts highest paid at a time when the government is working to rein in costs.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>In this new health care economy, there isnt an academic medical center that isnt exploring opportunities to align with community-based hospitals as they prepare to take unnecessary costs out of the system, said Newton health care consultant Ellen Lutch Bender.</p>
<p>[Partners</a> HealthCare System in talks to acquire South Shore Hospital in South Weymouth - The Boston Globe online](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/Boston/businessupdates/2012/04/partners-healthcare-system-talks-acquire-south-shore-hospital-south-weymouth/xGlgDU6J8s8DLd7A4MOBKP/index.html]Partners”>http://www.boston.com/Boston/businessupdates/2012/04/partners-healthcare-system-talks-acquire-south-shore-hospital-south-weymouth/xGlgDU6J8s8DLd7A4MOBKP/index.html)</p>
<p>It’s cool to see what’s going on in MA as this will happen in the rest of the country in several years.</p>
<p>I am not always a fan of mergers.</p>
<p>The Anthem-Blue Cross merger didn’t do much for customers. :)</p>
<p>Good info though…thanks.</p>
<p>Economies of scale, and partnering to fill in areas where there are weaknesses…big city hospitals are coining the cash from donations, and spreading their footprints…</p>
<p>Yeah…economies of scale… :)</p>
<p>The major problem for city hospitals is the uninsured using the ER as their primary doctor,so that in turn makes many operate at a loss…which in turn leads some to close or merge…not a good thing for those with little or no insurance</p>
<p>And has Massachusettes solved the ER problem?</p>
<p>The research indicates that healthcare reform has no impact on the ER problem - ER visits continue to grow.</p>
<p>To explore the importance of these effects, we examined the Massachusetts experience. The state’s 2006 health care reform was a model for the ACA and reduced the proportion of Massachusetts adults under the age of 65 who were uninsured by 7.7 percentage points between the fall of 2006 and the fall of 2009.4 To determine whether any changes in ED utilization in Massachusetts reflected the effect of Massachusetts’ reform or were merely representative of broader regional trends in ED utilization, we used New Hampshire and Vermont as control states.</p>
<p>The data on combined inpatient and outpatient ED use (top graph) suggest that the Massachusetts reform did not change the state’s trend in total ED utilization relative to that in states where no such reform was enacted. The continuous upward trend in ED utilization throughout the three periods is remarkably consistent from state to state; if we didn’t know which state had implemented the reform law, we could not guess on the basis of these data. Although the majority of ED visits are outpatient visits, inpatient ED visits account for a large fraction of total ED costs (approximately 65% in our data set). To clarify the trends in such visits, we show in the bottom graph inpatient visits only. Here, too, we find no evidence that the Massachusetts reform significantly increased hospitalizations from the ED relative to those in other states that did not pass reforms. We also examined ED use in safety-net hospitals, which were disproportionately affected by the insurance expansion, but did not find evidence that ED utilization in these hospitals was different from that in similar hospitals in other states. In summary, ED use increased in Massachusetts after reform but also increased by similar amounts in New Hampshire and Vermont, states that did not implement insurance expansions.</p>
<p>On the basis of these findings, we conclude that Massachusetts’ health care reform law has thus far neither increased nor decreased ED utilization relative to that in other states. The similarity among states is to be expected if the level of ED visits is dominated by broader trends in population health, such as health status or accidents that are not affected by a health insurance expansion. Alternatively, it is possible that this null result arises from two equal forces pushing in opposite directions — that the Massachusetts insurance expansion increased prevention, thereby reducing ED use, but that this effect has been offset by the reduced out-of-pocket cost of using the ED or difficulties in finding primary care physicians.</p>
<p>[New</a> England Journal of Medicine: Massachusetts’ Health Care Reform and Emergency Department Utilization](<a href=“http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1109273]New”>http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1109273)</p>
<p>BCEagle91…great link.</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>From an investment perspective, it would seem like a good move to look at distressed hospitals in large cities for prospective buyouts in a few years. I know zilch about this area but it’s cool looking at the future locally.</p>
<p>I think that the ER cost issue follows the laws of supply and demand with PCPs. Singapore seems to have solved the cost issues by increasing the supply. That’s obviously a long-term process. I don’t know if we have the will to do it that way. It would mean something like investing in medical students and requiring them to work as PCPs or at least in-state for some period of time. I think that going the medical school route is already very tough, even without having to deal with the cost issues. One of my nieces is starting in the fall so I’ll get to hear from her what it is like.</p>
<p>Son already works with a lot of medical doctors but I don’t think that he’ll get to learn much about the process of becoming a medical doctor.</p>
<p>More increases are coming as Ins. Companies require to cover more and more (buttox for teachers in Baltimore…as an example) and employers will be hiring less as their part is going up also. Thanks to new health care law, we are jammed from both sides as we will be paying for current un-insured also. No wonder that government excluded itself from all of this, they understand perfectly the bad deal they created for the rest of us.</p>