There’s significant reaction on both sides from the Boston Globe expose on Partners Healthcare, where competing hospitals and health insurers are up in arms about the disproportionate reimbursement that Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals receive.
One of those hospital’s CEO, BI-Deaconess’ Paul Levy, happily linked to the post, while others simply said it proved how “how elite hospitals rip you off.“
I wrote that Partners shouldn’t be penalized for good fiscal sense and ruthless business strategy. Emergency physician Shadowfax elaborates further, writing that if insurers got their way, all the hospitals would go bankrupt:
If the other hospitals were able to get compensated for their services at the Partner’s rates, they would be making money. Instead, the insurance companies underpay when they can get away with it, and all the rest of the hospitals are losing money. And Partners is the bad guy?
He goes on to imply that the health insurers leaked confidential payment schedules to the investigative reporters, meaning that they controlled the narrative of this front-page story.
It goes back to supply and demand. Partners is able to charge more because patients demand their services. Period. Tufts Health Plan once refused to cave in to Partners, and look what happened. Patients revolted and threatened move to another insurer.
As long as patients continue to demand “brand-name,” nationally ranked, medicine, no amount of negative journalism will affect Partners’ ability to demand higher payments and dominate negotiations with health insurers.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Many interesting points have already been raised here, but I would like to expand the scope. In line with the statement from above, “Partners shouldn’t be penalized for good fiscal sense and ruthless business strategy”, could not the same be said about the vilified pharmaceutical industry. Why is it so easy to see the virtue of success when it is a hospital system, but so difficult when it comes via the biopharmaceutical/device industries? Maybe a rhetorical question right now, but some day I would like to hear some one provide an answer.
Tom from Boston