Massachusetts must implement proposals to reduce health care costs to sustain the state health insurance law enacted last year, policymakers said Monday at a forum in Boston, the Boston Globe reports. The law, which will require most state residents to obtain health insurance by July 1, will cost almost $1.7 billion this year.

At the forum, Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray (D) said that the state could reduce health care costs by hundreds of millions of dollars through the adoption of several proposals, such as a plan that would require physicians and hospitals to implement electronic health record systems within five years. Murray said the proposal and other investments in technology would reduce health care costs by "cutting through the mountain of bureaucratic paperwork and improving worker productivity," adding, "If we do not constrain health care costs, the system we worked so hard to create and implement will collapse."

However, Murray did not provide details on the proposal or a mechanism to fund the plan. Some experts estimate that the proposal would cost $500 million, and others maintain that the implementation of EHR systems alone would not result in a large reduction in health care costs.

Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services Secretary JudyAnn Bigby -- who serves as chair of the Cost and Quality Council, a committee established by the state health insurance law to consider proposals to reduce health care costs and improve quality -- said that the committee will consider plans to reduce the use of expensive medical procedures that do not have clear benefits. In addition, she said that the state should seek to address obesity and other expensive medical conditions to reduce health care costs.

Leslie Kirwan, secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Administration and Finance, said that the state also seeks to "improve the efficiency of MassHealth," the state's Medicaid program, to reduce health care costs. Stuart Altman, a professor of health policy at Brandeis University, helped moderate the forum, which was sponsored by the BlueCross BlueShield of Massachusetts Foundation, the Massachusetts Health Policy Forum and the Massachusetts Medicaid Policy Institute. (Dembner, Boston Globe, 5/15).

Opinion Pieces
The Boston Globe on Tuesday published an editorial and an opinion piece on the state health insurance law. Summaries appear below.Boston Globe: "It won't be easy, but the coalition" that helped enact the law "has to stick together to restrain health care inflation so that health insurance is affordable for all those who must buy it under the state mandate," according to a Globe editorial. At the forum, neither Murray nor Bigby "provided enough detail to show how the ideas [Murray] raised would control costs," the editorial states, adding, "The council needs the full support of the political leadership of the state to align" the interests of health insurers and large hospitals "and keep the cost down" (Boston Globe, 5/15).

Sally Pipes, Boston Globe: "So one year in," the state has a health insurance law that, "even if no more concessions to liberal advocates are made, falls 20% short of its stated goal" of universal coverage and costs at least $13 million more than previously estimated, Pipes, president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, writes in a Globe opinion piece. "Interestingly, the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector, the bureaucrats in charge of implementing the plan, decided that the universal individual mandate does not apply to everyone, but rather only those who can afford the premiums," a move that will exempt 20% of uninsured state residents from the law, Pipes writes. She adds that the Connector "also bowed to pressure and reduced the monthly premiums on the subsidized but-not-entirely-free health care plans," a move that will increase the cost of the law by $13 million (Pipes, Boston Globe, 5/15).

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