Massachusetts

Your shiny new iPad Pro is on the fritz. The touchscreen is cracked and isn’t working properly. You could take it to an affordable local repair shop, but mom and pop may not know how to heat up the glass ​just enough to separate the LCD from the rest of the device — it’s a complicated process that involves an acute understanding of the tablet’s insides. Once they’ve cracked open the iPad, they may not even know what to do to replace each component...

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Doctors who were fed meals costing even less than $20 later prescribed certain brand-name pills more often than rival medicines, according to a new analysis published on Monday of a federal database. And in most cases, costlier meals were associated with still higher prescribing rates for Medicare Part D drugs made by the same companies that provided the food. The findings, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, are likely to intensify an ongoing debate over the extent to which ties between drug makers and doctors unduly influence medical practice and the nation’s health care costs...

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[...] How much protection does health insurance offer and how can consumers know? Read More »

When big health insurers propose mergers, it makes for good antitrust enforcement theater to try to block them. However, if government officials want to address anti-competitive activities that have a dramatically bigger impact, they should shift their focus to local market provider M&A activity that consistently show prices increase after the deal is done. However, the most rapacious, anti-competitive practices I’ve seen in my entire career have come from hospitals–frequently from tax-exempt “nonprofits” that would make John D. Rockefeller blush with their brutal actions. The combined impact has created a middle class economic depression that has driven populist presidential campaign success, which was highlighted in a recently released Brookings study.

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“How much will my MRI cost?” It sounds like a simple question. But before Oct. 1, it was very difficult to get an answer. Now, Massachusetts is pulling back the curtain on what has been a largely secret world of health care prices. A new state law says health insurers must be able to tell members, in advance, how much a test, treatment or surgery will cost. Read More »

The Massachusetts eHealth Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative will give 32 collaborative projects up to $75,000 each in HIway Implementation Grants to help 80 healthcare organizations across the Commonwealth connect to the HIway, Massachusetts' statewide health information exchange. Read More »