Sarah Gantz has been fascinated with Maryland’s Medicare waiver since the Baltimore Business Journal hired her to write about health care more than two and a half years ago. She describes the policy as “the lifeblood of Maryland’s $15 billion hospital industry.”
Maryland is the only state with an “all-payer” hospital system – a system in which every health plan and every payer pays about the same rate to a given hospital for a given procedure or treatment. That includes Medicare, under a waiver from the federal government. A commission sets the costs and there’s a lot less cost-shifting in the system if everyone is playing by the same rules.
Despite its importance, Gantz says that most people write it off as a wonky hospital rule that doesn’t affect them. With help from the AHCJ Reporting Fellowship on Health Care Performance, Gantz set out to explain why the policy is worth taking the time to understand. In this piece for AHCJ, she tells our readers what she learned and how she turned wonky policy into stories about real people.
