| A Senate working group has wrapped up its series of public discussions on health care cost drivers but will continue talks with industry officials as its members aim to produce new cost control legislation this month or next.
“I think that we’re looking at sometime late September, early October, but nothing is set in stone in any way, shape or form,” said Sen. James Welch, who co-chairs the Health Care Financing Committee. “But that’s the goal that we have, is to try and when we get back from recess really continue to focus in on it.”
Legislative leaders have not scheduled post-Labor Day formal sessions, and both branches plan to hold informal sessions this week.
Welch and a handful of other senators last year began studying methods other states use to manage health care costs, an issue Massachusetts sought to address through 2012 law that followed the state’s landmark health care access law of 2006.
Total medical spending in Massachusetts grew 4.1 percent in 2015 to $57.4 billion, outpacing the target set in the 2012 law, and MassHealth, the state Medicaid program, accounts for about 40 percent of the state’s nearly $40 billion budget.
Lawmakers in July rejected a series of MassHealth eligibility reforms proposed by Gov. Charlie Baker, indicating they’d instead craft their own plans to address health care. Senate leaders said they intended to produce a bill this fall to “target the core drivers of costs in the state’s health care system while aiming to improve health outcomes and maintain the commonwealth’s historical commitment to universal coverage.”
As part of that effort, the working group held three roundtable discussions during August, gathering feedback on cost containment. The last session, held last Wednesday, focused on chronic and acute care management, and the first two covered behavioral health and long-term care.
The goal of the discussion, Welch said, was to discover “common themes and common subjects that come up and help us try to formulate some of the areas of policy that we might want to continue to look into and dive a little bit deeper into.”
