This is getting very ugly.
The Boston Globe writes another piece on Partners HealthCare, the conglomerate comprising of twin titans Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals.
Previously, it was spotlighted that Partners’ facilities and doctors received payments in excess of the region’s competing medical institutions.
Today, the concern is how Partners is expanding to suburban areas, putting community hospitals at risk.
Partners appears unapologetic and shows no restraint in fighting back the claims. Most entertaining is Jack Connors, a longtime Partners chairman, who holds nothing back.
Commenting on the criticism of Partners’ clout, he defiantly says, “I frankly think that some of it is jealousy. Maybe that’s not fair, but that’s how I read it.”
He pulls no punches in calling out Paul Levy, CEO of competing BI-Deaconess Medical Center (who blogs at Running a hospital): “There are not enough crying towels to keep this guy in service. . . . He can’t get rolls of dimes fast enough to drop dimes to complain about Partners.”
Or Charlie Baker for that matter, CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (who also blogs at Let’s Talk Health Care): “Charlie once told me that he wakes up every morning wondering if this is the day Blue Cross is going to decide to put him out of business. So Charlie’s convinced himself he has to be nervous. . . . Charlie gets right over there on the Paul Levy side of the pew.”
Fightin’ words indeed.
Partners comes off as arrogant in the piece, and Connors would be better served by projecting a bit of humility. However, my overall take has not changed. They are practicing smart business in a ruthless competitive medical environment, and are leveraging patient demand for “brand-name” medicine brilliantly.
We are in an age where being placed on a US News top 10 list speaks more volumes than any advertising campaign from a community hospital, hit pieces from a newspaper, or anything coming out of the Dartmouth Atlas. Remember, a local insurer tried to play hardball with Partners by dropping coverage to their network of doctors. Patients revolted by threatening to change insurers, and retain their access to MGH and the Brigham. The insurer acquiesced.
Partners recognizes this fact. Thomas Lee, chief executive of the Partners physician network, assesses the situation perfectly: “No one can stop this. This is not something that Partners is doing to community hospitals. . . . This isn’t Partners. This is the natural changes occurring in the marketplace.”
What’s the answer? You have to remove the patient demand for the Massachusetts General or Brigham name, and brand-name medicine in general. Do this, and Partners’ clout will evaporate overnight. That’s a difficult task no doubt, but it’s clear that’s what Paul Levy and Charlie Baker, as well a cadre of health policy wonks, are trying to do both in blogs and various media interviews. A public re-education campaign delinking patient outcomes from brand seems to be the guerilla-style tactics Partners’ adversaries are taking.
Massachusetts is growing increasingly concerned at the impending monopoly in Boston’s health care market. Public health commissioner John Auerbach says that patient choice remains paramount, and that “the degree to which consolidation eliminates choice for patients, I don’t think that’s good. I think that patients should always have a choice.”
The problem is, patients have already made their choice. And so far, it’s resoundingly in favor of Partners HealthCare.
Related posts:
- Tufts Medical Center plays the Partners HealthCare card and drops Blue Cross Blue Shield
- Patients are the reason why Partners HealthCare is so strong
- Partners Healthcare responds to the payment disparity uproar
- Can Massachusetts stop Partners Healthcare?
- How Boston’s top hospitals are paid much more
- Should hospitals be penalized for financial success?
- Comparing hospital quality and cost in Massachusetts
{ 5 comments }
Great Bit Kevin. I’d love to see you make it into a full op-ed. There are alot of lessons to be learned from Mass and this is one of them. Consumer driven medicine is engrained into the psyche of Americans over decades and this should be a lesson to Obama and left leaning policy wonks. The American public doesn’t care presently or in the future about comparitive effectiveness, VA quality or overtesting. We’ve been shown hints of this time and time again. The first time a patient is denied a heart cath and the cardiologist frames the encounter as the government denying them a lifesaving procedure. Game over, it doesn’t matter what the data says in the mind of that patient. The next time radical ideas such as single payor or flat salaries for all physicians are bandied about, they must remember that we physicians as the defacto employees in this enterprise will make or break them. Depending on how we see reform, if it comes, affecting us. Take it as a lesson Ezra Klein and Maggie Mahar, lest you see grandma with a pitchfork and and a torch coming to burn your house down.
Perception is 4/5 of quality. Every patient want’s to believe they have the “best doctor”.
I have patients tell me they love certain doctors. If they only knew how irrational their “best doctors” are behind the scenes.
Like everything else in the world, image is everything.
I’ve had two close family members with significant illness in the last two years — who went to Cleveland Clinic. One is a physician, another married to a Professor of Public Health at another (unnamed) University.
Both have said the care they received was excellent, and well beyond what they would have received at their respective institutions. I can’t say this is the case of Partner’s Hospitals, but sometimes the rankings actually mean something.
Few patients would be demanding MGH or Brighams if they didn’t have a third party payer covering the extra cost. If patients had to pay that extra cost out of pocket, they would take a closer look at whether or not these name brand hospitals are worth it. That would solve this problem quickly.
Exactly anon 2:41 PM
Health savings accounts. Heck, I could have told you fifteen years ago about the different payment rates the Boston hospitals got for the same work. Some are more equal than others.
Used to work in Massachusetts. Then moved to Oregon where the medical school exempted itself from the tort laws the rest of the state lived under. They limited their total liability (not just pain and suffering, but total) to $500,000. They they had the audacity to lecture the private doctors about improving their own practices to avoid lawsuits. Somehow that seemed to revolve around EMR’s. Some are more equal than others.
The Massachusetts healthcare reform “connector” is making it difficult to continue with HSA’s in the People’s Republic. Limiting the dollar value of the HDHP/HSA deductible to less than what Federal law allows.
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