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Knowledge launched Wednesday by Blue Cross Blue Protect Massachusetts revealed that psychological well being visits amongst its members have elevated 100% since 2019. In response, the payer is upgrading its companies.
Within the third quarter of 2022, BCBS Massachusetts’ members had about 8 million behavioral well being visits, in comparison with about 4 million in 2019. The insurer has expanded its supplier community by nearly 46% to about 18,000 clinicians within the final 5 years to satisfy this demand. To additional meet members’ wants, the payer is increasing its main psychological well being supplier community by contracting with Talkiatry, which offers digital psychiatric remedy, in-person remedy and medicine administration, the corporate lately introduced.
Except for working with Talkiatry, BCBS Massachusetts can be focusing on particular circumstances and populations by contracting with two specialty psychological well being supplier teams: And Nonetheless We Rise and DynamiCare. The previous is a supplier for marginalized communities, whereas the latter is a digital therapeutics and training firm for these battling dependancy.
Though psychological well being was a problem earlier than the pandemic, Covid-19 escalated the difficulty, mentioned Dr. Greg Harris, senior medical director of behavioral well being at BCBS Massachusetts. It is for that reason that the insurer is ramping up its psychological well being companies.
“We had been seeing yr over yr will increase previous to the pandemic and the tempo of the will increase have gone up dramatically,” Harris mentioned in an interview.
BCBS Massachusetts selected Talkiatry due to its potential to offer assist for quite a lot of ages, wants and preferences, Harris mentioned. The New York Metropolis-based firm joins a number of different main psychological well being teams within the payers’ community, together with Thriveworks, Headway, Refresh Psychological Well being and Valera Well being.
Along with increasing its main psychological well being companies, the insurer knew it wanted to fight well being disparities as properly, Harris mentioned. That’s why it selected to work with And Nonetheless We Rise and DynamiCare.
“And Nonetheless We Rise focuses on numerous populations, that’s their sub-specialty and that’s why we introduced that group in,” Harris said. “DynamiCare we introduced in as a result of they give attention to a broad vary of substance use circumstances: alcohol, medication and tobacco. And so they present a novel therapy mannequin that we couldn’t actually get in some other means.”
It already contracts with NOCD for OCD therapy, Forge Well being for dependancy and trauma assist, Conscious Restoration Care for dependancy therapy and Brightline for household psychological well being assist.
Wanting forward, Harris mentioned BCBS Massachusetts will add further digital psychological well being teams and sort out different specialty areas, akin to consuming issues and autism.
“These two areas, autism and consuming issues, are areas of excessive scientific complexity and typically issue to find the proper care in actual time,” Harris mentioned. “In order that’s why these are two precedence areas that we’ve actually made a dedication to try to resolve as quickly as doable.”
Picture: SIphotography, Getty Photographs
Local News
New Hampshire is leading an effort from 25 states to challenge a Massachusetts gun law, and this month, they’re taking it to the Supreme Court.
The centerpiece of the argument is the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, N.H., which reaches across state lines into Tyngsborough. If shoppers park on the south side of the mall’s parking lot, they might end up crossing state lines during a visit.
The attorneys general of New Hampshire and 24 other Republican-led states say this poses a potential problem for firearm holders. A New Hampshire resident who is legally carrying a firearm on their home state’s side of the parking lot may inadvertently be breaking the law when they cross the lot into Massachusetts, where it is illegal to carry without a permit.
Joining New Hampshire are the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming, who are calling the arrangement unconstitutional. The states have rallied behind Phillip Marquis of Rochester, N.H., to ask the Supreme Court to protect out-of-state residents from Massachusetts’ firearms regulations.
“The geography of the mall is such that a New Hampshire resident might find themselves in Massachusetts if she parks on the south side of the parking lot or visits Buffalo Wild Wings,” reads a brief from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office to the Supreme Court. “If that person is carrying a firearm without a Massachusetts license — which would be constitutionally protected activity in most of the mall—that person risks being charged as a felon and facing mandatory incarceration in Massachusetts.”
The trouble began for Marquis in 2022 when he was in a car accident in Massachusetts, according to the brief. When police arrived, he informed them that he had a pistol on him and was subsequently charged with carrying a firearm without a license.
Marquis previously sued the Commonwealth for the burdens that Massachusetts’ firearms permit law creates on out-of-state visitors, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court denied his claims. They ruled in March that the state’s nonresident firearms licensing laws were constitutional, according to court documents.
Claiming that the Massachusetts court denied him his Second and Fourteenth Amendment rights, Marquis has petitioned the Supreme Court to federally overrule that court’s decision. In his petition, Marquis invoked New York State Rifle & Police Association, Inc. v. Bruen, where the court established that state firearms restrictions must be covered by the Second Amendment or adhere to historical firearms regulations.
Using Bruen, Marquis and the Republican attorneys general supporting him are aiming to prove that there is no justification for applying Massachusetts’ firearms restrictions to out-of-state residents and that to do so would be unconstitutional. However, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court found the law constitutional even under Bruen because it intends to prevent dangerous people from obtaining firearms, just as historical regulations have done.
“To the extent that the Commonwealth restricts the ability of law-abiding citizens to carry firearms within its borders, the justification for so doing is credible, individualized evidence that the person in question would pose a danger if armed,” the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision read. “Both case law and the historical record unequivocally indicate that this justification is consistent with ‘the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.’”
It’s not immediately clear if the Supreme Court will respond to Marquis’ appeal or when it will make any kind of decision, but lower courts are at something of a crossroads with how and when to apply Bruen to gun possession cases. As such, they are looking to the Supreme Court for a more definitive answer.
Since the proof of historical context that Bruen requires has led to some uncertainty, any ruling that these lower courts make is likely to amount to a partisan decision. However, if the Supreme Court provides more substantive clarity in a response to Marquis, these lower courts just might find the answer they are seeking.
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Massachusetts State Lottery players won two $100,000 prizes Friday from the day’s “Mass Cash” drawings.
The winning tickets were sold at the Roslindale Food Mart on Washington Street and McSheffrey’s of the South End convenience store (with Mobil gas) on Main Street in Woburn.
Mass Cash drawings happen twice daily, at 2 p.m. and at 9 p.m. It costs just $1 to play.
Overall, at least 625 prizes worth $600 or more were won or claimed in Massachusetts on Monday, including 6 in Springfield, 22 in Worcester and 14 in Boston.
The Massachusetts State Lottery releases a full list of winning tickets every day. The list only includes winning tickets worth more than $600.
The two largest lottery prizes won so far in 2025 were each worth $15 million. One of the prizes was from a winning “Diamond Deluxe” scratch ticket sold in Holyoke, and the other was from a “300X” scratch ticket sold on Cape Cod.
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