Mass General Brigham has bullseye on its back

 Mass General Brigham, the state’s largest hospital system and its largest employer, has been down this road before.

In 2015, when it went by the name of Partners HealthCare, the hospital system tried to expand by acquiring South Shore Hospital and two Hallmark Healthcare hospitals in Medford and Melrose. The deal was shot down by Superior Court Judge Janet Sanders, who feared it would give Partners too much control of the market. 

Now Mass General Brigham is trying to expand by building new outpatient facilities in Westborough, Westwood, and Woburn – and it is facing similar concerns. On the same day recently, the House passed legislation that would restrict Mass General Brigham’s ability to expand, Attorney General Maura Healey released a report suggesting the proposed outpatient facilities would generate $385 million in annual profits, and the Health Policy Commission indicated it may push for price caps on academic medical centers.

John McDonough, a professor at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University, and Paul Hattis, a fellow at the Lown Institute, said on The Codcast that what happened in 2015 seems to be happening again. 

Hattis said the House, Healey, and the Health Policy Commission are all trying to rein in Mass General Brigham. “If I were MGB leadership hearing all three say that, I’d be a bit worried right now,” he said. 

At the Health Policy Commission’s cost trends hearing on November 17, Anne Klibanski, the president and CEO of Mass General Brigham, sounded very much like her predecessor from 2015, Gary Gottlieb. Gottlieb said acquiring South Shore Hospital and the two Hallmark hospitals in Medford and Melrose would allow the system to serve more patients in lower-cost settings. That was the same rationale Klibanski gave for building outpatient centers in Woburn, Westwood, and Westborough. 

Hattis said Klibanski talked about providing the right care in the right setting, but never mentioned the word price. And he said Healey’s report, documenting a projected annual profit of $385 million from the outpatient expansion, indicated the hospital system’s top priority. “It’s really about generating additional profit,” he said.

McDonough said what’s happening with Mass General Brigham is not unique to Massachusetts. “All across the country what we see are dominant major academic medical centers that have a dominating presence in their markets and continue to expand,” he said. “And they may be nominally not-for-profit, but they act very much like any for-profit business in terms of grabbing up opportunities and growing as much as they can, which is exactly what happens outside health care.” 

McDonough and Hattis ran through a list of possible options for regulators to pursue, everything from targeting higher-priced hospital systems with performance goals to adopting a statewide price-setting system for acute care hospitals along the lines of what Maryland is doing. 

McDonough sees signs that the federal government is moving in a new direction on antitrust issues, and he said the pushback against Mass General Brigham’s expansion plans in Massachusetts somewhat reflects that shift. He said the politics of health care could get interesting as the state heads into an election year next year.

BRUCE MOHL

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UMass Dartmouth gets funding to build a new lab to study biodegradable plastics. (Cape Cod Times)

CRIMINAL JUSTICE/COURTS

Suspended Springfield police detective Gregg Bigda will stand trial beginning this week on civil rights violations related to his arrest of three Latino teenagers in 2016, where Bigda is alleged to have kicked one in the face after he was handcuffed and threatened to plant evidence on the boys and kill one of them. (MassLive)

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