Here are five things to know:
1. Neighborhood Health Plan, before it was acquired by Partners, was a leading Medicaid carrier in Massachusetts known for serving the poor. Since Neighborhood shifted its focus to expanding, poor and low-income people now make up just a fraction of its members. It has about 110,000 commercial members and about 33,000 members in the state Medicaid program.
2. In June, Partners HealthCare said it would transition all its employees from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts to its system-owned health plan by Jan. 1, 2019. The transition of coverage will affect about 100,000 people and nearly double the membership of Partners’ Neighborhood Health Plan.
3. Partners is working to build its insurance arm to compete with the state’s largest health plans: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Tufts Health Plan, which all have more members than Neighborhood.
4. Regarding that building effort, Neighborhood CEO David Segal said the company is “going to be very assertive.”
5. The rebranding is a chance for Neighborhood to break away from what it was historically known as: a local, Medicaid plan. “It’s about what employers feel when they hear ‘Neighborhood Health Plan’. … They don’t know it, and when they do know it, they associate it with a Medicaid plan,” Mr. Segal told The Globe.
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