CMS is on a quest to change the way Medicare pays health care providers. The worthy goal is to pay for performance to put it simply. More efficient, better coordinated care is highly desirable to be sure. Paying physicians for quality results rather than pure fee-for-service while highly desirable, may be more difficult to measure and achieve.
The real question is what impact will all this have on patients? Well, some may hear grousing by their medical professionals. Others may be told they can’t receive a service they received in the past because “Medicare won’t pay.” But in the final analysis better coordinated care, even less care that previously generated more revenue than it did better health is good. High cost and high utilization doesn’t guarantee better health care.
Kaiser Health News: HHS Pledges To Quicken Pace Toward Quality-Based Medicare Payments
Kaiser Health News staff writer Jordan Rau reports: “The Obama administration Monday announced a goal of accelerating changes to Medicare so that within four years, half of the program’s traditional spending will go to doctors, hospitals and other providers that coordinate their patient care, stressing quality and frugality. The announcement by Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell is intended to spur efforts to supplant Medicare’s traditional fee-for-service medicine, in which doctors, hospitals and other medical providers are paid for each case or service without regard to how the patient fares. Since the passage of the federal health law in 2010, the administration has been designing new programs and underwriting experiments to come up with alternate payment models.” (Rau, 1/26)
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