The Boston Globe Spotlight Team had another installment of its Partners Healthcare saga in Sunday's paper. The general gist: Partners horning in on community hospitals in their home commmunities, Jack Connors (board chair at Partners) extolling the virtues of the free market (with some less-than-kind words for the competition), community hospital execs and other partisans […]
Category Archives: Certificate of Need
The latest health care legislation from the People's Republic of Massachusetts
Once again, Massachusetts is out in front on a number of hot issues. The legislation, championed by Senate President Therese Murray, was signed by Gov. Patrick earlier this week. See the full text of AN ACT TO PROMOTE COST CONTAINMENT, TRANSPARENCY AND EFFICIENCY IN THE DELIVERY OF QUALITY HEALTH CARE and the Boston Globe story […]
Pan Mass Challenge coming up this weekend
This summer has been busy, busy, busy, so my apologies to all of you out there in HealthBlawg land for spotty posting lately. My clients didn’t get the memo about a nice long vacation this month or next, and I’ve been training for the Pan Mass Challenge, a 2-day, 200-mile bicycle fundraiser for Boston’s Dana […]
New Jersey's Governor's Commission on Rationalizing Health Care Resources issues final report
New Jersey’s Governor Jon Corzine finally got a final report from the commission on rationalizing healthcare resources he created by executive order just over 15 months ago. Unlike the Berger Commission in the neighboring Empire State (which issued its final report just after the N.J. commission was authorized), the N.J. commission did not recommend specific […]
Private equity, public accountability, nursing facilities and grandstanding
Bob Coffield’s recent post on a pending reconsideration of a West Virginia CON issued to The Carlyle Group (a private equity firm) for the acquisition of HCR Manor Care (a publicly-traded company with about 275 nursing facilities nationwide) got me thinking about the appropriateness of using these sorts of procedural acrobatics to address what may […]
August 2007 Massachusetts certificate of need applications for radiation therapy
Well, let’s cut to the chase: there aren’t any. That’s right, no applications were filed August 1 for radiation therapy CONs (or DONs — determinations of need — as we call them here in the People’s Republic of Massachsuetts). Highly unusual, no? Could you imagine if the FCC held a bandwidth auction and nobody came? […]