Worcester Business Journal

24 2022 Economic Forecast • Worcester Business Journal • www.wbjournal.com Inflection point During the annual WBJ Health Care Forum, speakers detailed the many challenges facing the industry H ealth care in Central Massachusetts is at an inflection point, WBJ panelists say. e healthcare system is in a moment of transition, according to panelists and speakers at WBJ's annual Health Care Forum. On both the federal and local levels, healthcare leaders are at a crossroads as they tackle not only the coronavirus pandemic, but also the many industry challenges the pandemic has highlighted or exacerbated, including a daunting workforce shortage and inequities in access to care, more broadly. Inherent to these challenges are getting people cov- ered by health insurance in the first place, as well as regulating the cost of care, said keynote speaker Dr. Jonathan Gruber, Ford profes- sor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cam- bridge, and former healthcare program director at the National Bureau of Economic Research. "Healthcare premiums contin- ue to go up, but they're going up at a slower rate than they were before the exchanges were introduced," Gru- ber said during a talk which launched the panel event, referencing state healthcare exchanges established as part of the U.S. Affordable Care Act. From Gruber's vantage point, it's not so much the cost of health care needing to be lowered in the United States, but rather the rate at which costs are expanding. While other countries have opted to regulate costs in the industry, he said, the United States does not. "e private market is not capable of addressing the under- lying high cost of health care," Gruber said. And on the other hand, against the politically volatile backdrop of the ACA, many eligible for free healthcare coverage simply aren't signing up for it, Gruber said. In response, he promoted the idea of automatic enrollment for people who fall within that category. Even that, he said, would far from bring the country to a point where 100% of its population had coverage. One-third of those uncovered by health insurance are undocumented, with no political interest in fixing that, he said. "is is not moving us to universal coverage by any sense of the term," he said. Still, he argued, compulsory enrollment and im- proving healthcare choices could do a lot in the way of addressing the problem. Local challenges On the local healthcare front, organizations in Cen- tral Massachusetts are facing many of the same problem plaguing healthcare networks and their partners across the country, according to the event's panelists, which Dr. Jonathan Gruber, MIT professor Ken Bates, Open Sky Community Services Dr. Larry Garber of Reliant Medical Group in Worcester conducts a telehealth visit with a patient, a process increasingly used by the medical profes- sion during the COVID pandemic. H E A LT H C A R E PHOTO | MATT WRIGHT

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