Health Care & Prescription Drugs

Current Campaigns

Monitoring Health Care Costs

On July 1^st, under the new Health Care Law in Massachusetts, every resident must have health insurance. Disturbingly, for a product so important to our well being and so costly – family plans can easily exceed $15K a year – consumers have surprisingly little tools available to them to help compare health insurance plans and costs. We worked with the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector, the state agency responsible for implementing the new health care law, to make their Web site consumer-friendly and to enable consumers to more easily compare costs and benefits of health care plans. Read more.

Safe & Affordable Drugs

Pharmaceutical companies make the medicines that enable us to live healthier, longer lives. But their business practices also drive up drug prices and increase the risk of harmful side effects, and their strong-armed lobbying has blocked needed reforms. Read more.

Hospital Safety

Thousands of Americans every year succumb to infections at hospitals that result in serious illness or death. We’re working to make hospitals safer by requiring them reduce their hospital-acquired infections to zero (or as close to it as feasible) and to disclose and publicly report infection rates. Read more.

Overview

Our current health care system is crumbling. Costs are high and continue to soar, as insurance companies, the drug and medical device industry as well as hospitals all siphon off needed capital in the form of profits and high salaries.

Prescription drug costs are rising faster than all other health care expenses despite being the most profitable industry in the world, yet we continue to subsidize it twice—once by taxpayers, and once by American consumers, who pay far higher prices than do their counterparts in the rest of the world.

Quality, measured in basic health barometers compared to 29 developed nations is mediocre at best with the US ranked 23rd in infant mortality, and life expectancy rates for both men and women are now significantly shorter in the US than those in other nations.

Finally, state and federal laws shelter health insurance companies from any meaningful public accountability. For example, it's easier to get justice over a defective car than it is over a life-threatening denial of care by an HMO.

The lack of corporate accountability, high standards, and basic economic fairness has led to more problems than we should tolerate. Too often, it is powerful special interests that are keeping us from fulfilling our expectations of health and safety. MASSPIRG works to counter their influence and protect the health of all Massachusetts residents.

Consumers have surprisingly few tools available to them to help compare health insurance plans and costs. We are working to require health insurance companies to adopt a standardized, consumer-friendly disclosure form for their health insurance plans.