Balancing AMCs' Missions and Health Care Costs — Mission Impossible?

Abstract

U.S. academic medical centers will soon feel pressure to control costs even as they balance the imperatives of clinical care with missions in research, teaching, and community health. Two large Massachusetts AMCs have begun addressing this challenge. When major provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are implemented next January, few institutions will feel the pressure to control costs more acutely than academic medical centers (AMCs), which must balance the imperatives of clinical care with cost-intensive missions in research, teaching, and community health. Massachusetts AMCs don't have to guess at the law's likely impact: in 2006, our state launched its own health care reform involving principles and policy solutions similar to the ACA's. Massachusetts therefore provides a laboratory for gauging the effects of such reforms. Having largely solved the insurance problem, Massachusetts passed sweeping cost-control legislation in . . .