By Brooke Thomson
President & CEO

AIM member employers are painfully aware of the rising cost of providing health insurance to their employees.

They may not be aware that those rising costs are just one symptom of a broader challenge now engulfing the Massachusetts health-care system. It’s a challenge of extraordinary complexity – part pandemic fallout, part inflation, part worker shortage, part changing demographics – that does not lend itself to pat solutions or demagoguery.

The good news is that everyone – employers, hospitals, doctors, health plans, elected officials and regulators – understands the need to work together to solve the problem.

Sarah Iselin, President and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, sounded the alarm on health costs when she spoke at the AIM Executive Forum on March 14 at Alkermes in Waltham. Iselin said that the state Health Policy Commission reported that health-care expenditures rose 5.8 percent in 2022, nearly twice as fast as the benchmark established by state officials for that year.

She also referenced a Blue Cross survey that showed 40 percent of respondents had delayed seeking care because of the expense. None of this is news to employers who pay the lion’s share of health-insurance premiums in Massachusetts.

At the same time, the commonwealth’s world-class hospitals are facing acute capacity issues, nurse shortages, backed-up emergency rooms, and financial challenges. Registered-nurse vacancy rates at acute-care hospitals doubled from 6.4 percent in 2019 to 13.6 percent in 2022, with especially high vacancy rates seen in community hospitals.

“We are in every inch of real estate we can be in, managing surges. I’ve been practicing medicine in this community in Central Massachusetts for more than 30 years. I’ve seen a lot over those years, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” Eric Dickson, chief executive of UMass Memorial Health in Worcester, told The Boston Globe.

And all that comes as the state scrambles to save eight acute-care hospitals operated by financially troubled Steward Health Care.

The challenges facing the health care and health-insurance systems in Massachusetts have been years in the making and will take years to resolve. AIM remains committed, however, to rolling up its sleeves and working toward a solution that preserved Massachusetts’ unique global health system without bankrupting the employers who pay most of the bills.