Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts' former president and CEO, Andrew Dreyfus, has launched a course at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health that revolves around a central question: Can health insurers be good?
Mr. Dreyfus served as CEO at BCBSMA for 12 years and retired at the end of 2022. His new course called "Can health insurers be good? The potential and limits of health plans as agents of health system change," will aim to teach students how health plans are not a homogenous group and that nonprofits like BCBSMA can have a community mission, according to an April 5 article from the School of Public Health.
"There is a belief—and there is some truth to this—that health plans cause fragmentation in the health care system, that they tend to get between patients and their clinicians, that they’re profit-seeking, that they don't promote quality care, and that they are opponents of reform," Mr. Dreyfus said. "I want to try to unpack that a bit, to help students better understand the role that health plans play and offer examples from my own experience and from some guest lecturers."
A few of the case studies the course will analyze include BCBSMA's role in reforming Massachusetts' healthcare system in the 2000s, which served as a model for the ACA. Mr. Dreyfus is also looking to explore what the right mix of private versus public health insurance should look like in the U.S.