Massachusetts' Decisive Move to Attack Health-Care Costs

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http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/massachusetts-decisive-move-to-attack-health-care-costs/260775/


Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, pictured here at a rally with his wife, has just signed into law what may be a national milestone for health-care reform. (Jason Reed/Reuters)

Last week, Massachusetts took the next significant step in reforming its health care system -- a bill that will save the state as much as $200 billion in the next 15 years. Today, Governor Deval Patrick signed it into law, saying that Massachusetts has "cracked the code" on controlling health-care costs.

We needed to crack that code. Massachusetts is six years into implementing the precursor to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) -- the law that every state, now that the Supreme Court has upheld its key provisions, is now trying to decide how to implement. Our own landmark legislation, which then-governor Mitt Romney signed into law in 2006 and which became the blueprint for the ACA, has enabled Massachusetts to guarantee health-care coverage to a larger percentage of our population than any other state: 98 percent of our residents are covered, and 99.8 percent of children are insured.

But when Massachusetts passed the law, it made the calculated decision to tackle the thorny issues of cost and quality later. That time is now.

Massachusetts' health-care costs have escalated at an unsustainable rate. Consumers experience these increases as higher deductibles, copayments, and out-of-pocket costs. We've begun to get a good picture of what was contributing to the rising cost of health care -- and a clear indication that spending more was not necessarily contributing to our overall health.

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