Weak reform pitch

Five years ago Beacon Hill enacted a new law that, we were assured, would bend the health care cost curve and save consumers and taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars while improving health care outcomes. Now the Senate is back with the same goals and yet another everything-but-the-kitchen-sink bill — heavy on regulation and light on real reform.

Given the uncertainty of the health care landscape at the federal level, why should anyone believe this is the real solution?

The Senate bill seems to pit larger hospitals against smaller ones, by seeking to impose de

facto limits on prices that hospitals can charge insurers for their services.

The bill would also subject pharmaceutical companies to scrutiny of their pricing by oversight agencies created under that 2012 cost-containment law. For this privilege the drug companies would be assessed a new tax to fund the agencies’ work.

The bill ignores Gov. Charlie Baker’s proposal to move more than 100,000 adults who are enrolled in MassHealth, the government insurance program for the poor, to subsidized commercial plans offering the same level of coverage with slightly higher out-of-pocket costs. Instead the bill proposes a new system under which employers would be able to “buy in” to a MassHealth plan for their workers.

When they blew off Baker’s proposal during budget deliberations, Democratic lawmakers said they simply didn’t have time to review it before finalizing the budget. The excuse

du jour is the uncertainty of the federal Medicaid program, and fears that MassHealth recipients could face higher premiums or cuts to their coverage.

How nice it would be if lawmakers would simply acknowledge they are more comfortable asking taxpayers and businesses to shoulder the burden of providing the coverage than in asking those low-income adults, many of whom are working, to pay even a dollar more.

Senators claim this bill could save the MassHealth program $114 million by 2020, while overall savings could reach $525 million. But many of the same senators claimed the 2012 bill would save $200 million over 10 years.

Neither claim is particularly credible.