“Reference-based pricing,” which a handful of states have implemented, limits how much hospitals can charge some private insurance plans for procedures. Some say Vermont should adopt it.
The new services, costing a total of more than $16 million to establish, are described by clinic officials as a boon for patients. But they could siphon some revenue away from the city's two nonprofit hospitals as they struggle with the financial aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic and other forces stressing medical providers nationwide.
On Wednesday, New Hampshire's executive council will vote on whether Dartmouth Health should permanently take over operations at Hampstead Hospital.
The proposed agreement comes after a particularly difficult stretch for the mental health facility in Hampstead, with a string of violent patient outbursts over the last two years.
Under the proposal, the state would still oversee the hospital, but Dartmouth Health would take over all the services for children and young adults, such as the hospital's residential inpatient psychiatric treatment.
Kathleen Sebelius, who led HHS under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2014 talked with the health policy podcast Tradeoffs about the power of the position, and the checks and balances Kennedy may face in enacting some of his priorities. "The [HHS] secretary is in a position to do a lot of good, but also potentially do a lot of harm," she says.
A fresh wave of gene-editing therapies is surging to the fore — even as the field wrestles with the challenge of getting the first generation of expensive and complex CRISPR treatments to the people who need them.