On January 1, 2014, the State of Maryland embarked on an ambitious voyage. The state’s hospitals, physicians, public health departments, and other health care organizations left behind the comfortable shores of a unique all-payer system for inpatient and outpatient hospital care and moved into the uncharted waters of all-payer global budgeting. Under the old system, an independent commission (the Health Services Cost Review Commission) essentially provided each hospital with a rate card that determined what every payer, public and private, paid. The commission pooled expenses for uncompensated care through an assessment added to every hospital bill, distributed costs of medical education to all payers, and maintained stability for close to 4 decades.