Considering health care reform

4 Mar
2009

 

Disclaimer – the Annals of Internal Medicine is an ACP publication and I am on the ACP Board of Regents

Yesterday, the Annals published online 3 articles about health care reform.  They have started a discussion forum and asked me to comment.  I highly recommend reading the articles and joining the discussion – Health Care Reform.

While I have a conflict of interest, my comments are independent.  My commentary starts as:

These perspectives make interesting reading, however, they read as committee reports. I fear that none of the "solutions" recognize a particular fundamental problem in our payment system – the formula for paying physicians. We receive pay for "widgets." Each type of widget has a specific payment based on a billing code. Once we get paid for widgets, we have an incentive to do more widgets (or at least more expensive widgets.) Thus, we have an incentive structure to do more, not to do appropriate. A few examples might help.

When I have more time, I will expand my comments.  Let me know what you think.

 

Related posts:

  1. Some thoughts on health care reform
  2. Why this libertarian favors health care reform
  3. Thoughts on health care costs
  4. Are the Democrats destroying health care reform?
  5. Our health care system has perverse incentives

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Considering health care reform

March 4th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

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