Your team has been hired to perform consulting work for the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). Your team’s assignment is to create a report assessing the performance of a law enacted in Massachusetts in 2006: The Massachusetts Health Care Insurance Reform Law.
Mr. Jones, from HHS, is very familiar with the Porter and Teisberg framework for reinventing American healthcare. In fact, he believes that a Porter and Teisberg approach to healthcare delivery is the perfect answer to America’s healthcare woes.
That being the case, Mr. Jones wants you to critique the Massachusetts law vis-a-vis the Porter and Teisberg paradigm. He has also directed that the report critique the Massachusetts plan vis-a-vis previous healthcare reform efforts that have failed.
Ultimately, Mr. Jones wants to see if there are any lessons to be learned from Massachusetts’ 5 years of experience with a highly regulated health insurance industry. Specifically, Mr. Jones is looking for any information that might be used to improve our new, national healthcare law.
Assess the results of the Massachusetts law as of this date. The results/performance/success of the law can be measured several ways
Did Massachusetts achieve its stated goals? Were other measures of success degraded in the pursuit of the stated goals?
Has there been a significant reduction in the number of uninsured in Massachusetts?
Have the citizens of Massachusetts out-of-pocket costs for healthcare (premiums, co-pays, deductibles) changed? How?
Have the overall costs of healthcare--for the state--increased or decreased?
Has the healthcare law had an impact on the Massachusetts economy? Population? Other macroeconomic factors?
Has the new law led to increased healthcare value? (Health outcomes divided by the dollars spent to provide that healthcare)?
Have the “benefits” of the reform law outweighed the “costs” of the reform?
Finally, what do the results of the Massachusetts law portend for America as a whole, since the 2010 Health Care Reform Act was modeled on the Massachusetts law?