Tufts to Blue Cross: Fuhgettaboutit
The health insurance issue between carriers and hospitals has reached the staredown phase as Tufts Medical Center basically told Blue Cross to take a hike. The Globe reports that Tufts has been telling patients that it won’t accept coverage from Blue Cross Blue Shield after Jan. 31. At issue is Tufts contention that Blue Cross won’t pay its doctors a fair rate for its services.
Tufts says its serious. Blue Cross says it’s negotiating tactic. Patients say, WTF? But this seems to be only the beginning.
Tufts is an interesting test case in that it is not a mega-hospital along the lines of Brigham’s, yet it is tanked highly in several performance measures. For Tufts to stand up and say, “enough” might speak more to its survival instincts than any grandiose political gesture, but if they can pull this off will other hospitals follow suit?
And at the risk of sounding naive, at what point does the patient enter the equation? If a hospital like Tufts can’t survive the current climate and patients’ options become more limited, what happens then? To put it another way: Is quality healthcare a right? Or a privilege?
January 12th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
[...] And of course there are people like me (and many others) who are writing blog posts about the situation and adding their own unique perspectives to the analysis. Click here to access a post from the BawstonBlog. Here’s another interesting post on the subject titled: Tufts to Blue Cross: Fuhgettaboutit. [...]