The escalating use of low-value care — medical services that are unnecessary for patient care — was identified as a contributor to health care spending growth. One in four commercially insured residents received at least one low-value service in 2024.
Category: Health Care
The bill scraps the four types of exemptions currently outlined in statute for life-threatening situations for the mother or fetus, instead giving deference to doctors’ professional judgment.
Newly approved health insurance premium rates in the so-called merged market mean hundreds of thousands of Bay Staters will face average increases of more than 10 percent in 2027.
The bill would eliminate the existing criteria that allows for abortions to be performed 24 weeks or later into a pregnancy. Instead, leaving it up to the professional judgment of the physician performing the abortion.
Healey held a meeting Monday afternoon with leaders from Mass General Brigham and the Massachusetts Nurses Association, though no bargaining committee members attended.
The three-campus health system first announced its plans to shutter the obstetric unit and consolidate its maternity and neonatal services at Lawrence General Hospital, which is less than two miles away, on April 1. But on June 23, administrators informed Methuen nurses that they would cease admissions to the hospital’s maternity unit in six days.
This will be the 12th maternity service closure in Massachusetts – five of which have occurred in Gateway Cities – since 2010. The state technically doesn’t have any maternity care deserts – counties without hospitals or birth centers offering obstetric care, and no obstetric providers. But recent losses have experts and advocates sounding the alarm.
At a forum Wednesday, Rep. Marjorie Decker and maternal healthcare advocates cheered the fast-approaching reopening of the Cambridge Health Alliance Birth Center, which closed in March 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
As concern over the nationwide spread of measles grows, advocates for legislation intended to boost childhood vaccinations in Massachusetts have their fingers crossed that the bill, after being filed four times, will finally make it to passage this year.
Regulators have been intrigued about the prospect of an innovative care model to expand primary care access, but the sticker shock continues to linger and the HPC said Thursday it “remains uncertain” whether or when MinuteClinic will “provide comprehensive, high-quality primary care.”