This new post by Nancy Beaulieu, Michael Chernew, Soren Kristensen, and Meredith Rosenthal appears on the Health Affairs Blog as part of a series stemming from the Fourth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 29, 2016.
The notion that the American health care system should transition from paying for volume to paying for value has become nearly ubiquitous. There is a broad consensus that health care providers should be paid more if they deliver higher value care (i.e. care that results in substantial health gains per dollar spent).
These beliefs have led to a proliferation of value-based payment programs in both public and private sectors. For example, at the beginning of 2015, Sylvia Burwell announced the federal government’s commitment to tie 90 percent of fee-for-service Medicare payments to quality or value measures by 2018. In January of 2015, a newly formed alliance of health care providers, insurers, and employers called the Health Care Transformation Task Force committed to shifting 75 percent of their business to contracts that provide incentives for quality and efficiency by 2020.
The details of existing value or quality-based payment programs vary enormously and without regard to any conceptual framework. For example, they vary in the size of incentives and the measures used. They also vary in whether quality payments are contingent on financial savings and whether the value-based payment model is budget neutral. Even the term value is inconsistently defined. […]
Read the full post here.
