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The current system, researchers say, financially encourages doctors to do more procedures and is one of the reasons health costs have escalated. The health law required Medicare to gradually factor in quality into payments for hospitals, nursing homes, physicians and most medical providers.

Medicare had already decided that large physician groups -- those with 100 or more doctors, nurses, social workers or other health professionals -- will gain or lose as much as 1 percent of their pay starting in 2015. Those incentives would double to 2 percent the following year under draft regulations Medicare released this month. The proposal also would phase mid-sized physicians groups—those with between 10 and 99 health professionals—into the program in 2016 instead of in 2017. While they would be eligible for bonuses up to 2 percent, they would be shielded from any penalties for that first year.

The Minuteman plan would streamline billing processes to save on administrative costs and allow providers to work more closely with employers, organizers said. Information about smoking cessation or workers’ weight collected through employer wellness programs is not typically shared with doctors. “Imagine working closely with an employer who can help us gather data and, with employees’ permission, to be able to share that data with their primary care providers,” said Dr. Jeff Lasker, chief executive of the Tufts physician group, New England Quality Care Alliance.

Partners HealthCare last year announced plans to acquire Neighborhood Health Plan, which mostly serves low-income people. Steward Health Care has worked with Fallon Community Health Plan to develop plans offered at reduced prices through a small business cooperative created by the Retailers Association of Massachusetts.

A good chunk of Detroit’s debt problem is a health-costs problem. The Detroit Free Press notes that the city has $5.7 billion in unfunded retiree health-care liabilities, nearly a third of the city’s debt.

. It plans to transition its 19,389 retirees into the health law’s new marketplaces, saving the city somewhere between $27.5 million and $40 million annually.

. One report from the Pew Center for the States looked at 61 cities across the country and found that, taken together, they had $126.2 billion in health benefits promised to retirees. Only 6 percent of that amount – $8 billion – currently has funding.

he actions of these other employers don’t detract from the unique nature of Walgreens’ decision. Two months earlier, the retailer announced its partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services to extol the benefits of Obamacare to its employees and its customers. Their website still features the effort, and brochures continue to be distributed even while the corporation itself realizes that compliance must force it to abandon employer-provided health insurance for the people in the stores distributing the brochures to customers.

With the CBO predicting that rising health-care costs would increase at twice the rate of other federal spending, the same increase in costs will now be borne almost entirely by employees.  Finally, it appears that the private-exchange option will satisfy the employer mandate, which means that the employees cannot bail out of these private exchanges in order to qualify for federal subsidies, which prevents the employers from having to pay increasing fines for non-compliance.

limit the liability of the third-party payer.