The HPC’s 10-year anniversary video and interactive digital timeline features highlights of ten years of cost containment in Massachusetts, capturing the past, present, and future of the Commonwealth’s ambitious journey of health care reform.
In 2012, with a broad consensus to restrain rapidly increasing health care costs, the Commonwealth enacted a comprehensive new law, Chapter 224 of the Acts of 2012, the centerpiece of which is the innovative health care cost growth benchmark – a first-in-the-nation, statewide target for sustainable growth in total health care spending. The law also established the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission (HPC), a new independent state agency, to help monitor and guide this effort.
In the ten years since the passage of Chapter 224, Massachusetts total health care spending growth (including both public and private payers) was at or below national growth rates, a reversal from previous trends that account for billions in avoided spending for Massachusetts residents. Even so, by the end of the decade, spending growth was accelerating and above the benchmark from 2017 to 2019. Further, since 2020, the public health and economic challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic have underscored the importance of the goals Chapter 224 sought to promote. As the Commonwealth continues to navigate the lingering impacts of the pandemic – and as providers are facing significant headwinds with workforce, supply chain, and inflation issues – the need to create a more affordable, equitable, and high-quality health care system is even more apparent.
In January 2023, the HPC released a reflection video featuring interviews with former and current members of the HPC’s Board of Commissioners on the Commonwealth’s health care reform journey and the vision for the future. To further chronicle the milestones of the last decade, the HPC developed an interactive timeline of significant events with links to relevant research, reports, and other resources.
Together, these releases recognize efforts made thus far to advance a more transparent, accountable, and equitable health care system, and call for a renewed commitment to these goals in the years ahead – because the residents of the Commonwealth need and deserve affordable health care.
