Browse by Topic: Payment Reform

This report by Colleen Barry of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health explores opportunities and issues around integrating behavioral health care and primary care under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and payment and delivery system reforms in Massachusetts. The report provides preliminary recommendations on how these major policy changes might be implemented with the goal of improving the coordination, quality and outcomes of mental health and addiction care in the Commonwealth.

MassHealth, the Massachusetts Medicaid program, could play a leading role in implementing dramatic changes to the health care payment system. This report outlines how so-called global payments could be used in MassHealth, which provides insurance coverage to roughly 1.2 million people in the state. Global payments have been recommended by both the Special Commission on Health System Payment and the Massachusetts Health Care Quality and Cost Council as a means of reigning in health care cost increases and improving care coordination.

The 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law included a provision to make Medicaid hospital rate increases contingent upon quality measures, including measures of the reduction of racial and ethnic disparities. To date, no other pay-for-performance programs have incorporated measures of the reduction of racial and ethnic disparities into their incentives. MMPI organized the Massachusetts Medicaid Disparities Policy Roundtable to bring together a group of experts to develop and recommend an approach to implementing the program.