Steward and the SEIU have officially launched the Massachusetts Healthcare Equality and Affordability League, which will lobby state and federal policymakers to adjust Medicare and Medicaid payments to community hospitals. The alliance will also pressure commercial payers to reimburse providers uniformly across the board. Steward currently owns 11 community hospitals throughout Massachusetts.
“Just because you’re poor, your hospital shouldn’t get half as much to take care of you as they get in the richer neighborhoods,” Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre, MD, told the Boston Globe. “These are the issues we have to address, or else community hospitals are going to go extinct. And then health costs are really going to go up for everybody.”
Last week, the SEIU began its campaign on behalf of safety-net hospitals, saying the “inequalities and the threat they pose to consumers and community hospitals have become the ‘elephant in the room.'”
High reimbursements to affluent Massachusetts hospitals and health systems have been covered extensively in the past. Paul Levy, former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has devoted several blog posts to the issue, especially in regard to the market dominance of Boston-based Partners HealthCare.
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Hometown Healthcare Isn’t Dead: Why (Most) Smart Community Hospitals Can Still Thrive
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