The Barack Obama administration has announced plans to tie 90 percent of all Medicare fee-for-service payments to some sort of quality or value measure by 2018. Sounds exciting! Who wouldn't like to ensure that their doctors are paid for delivering value, rather than just randomly sticking needles into us? Unfortunately, as both the Official Blog Spouse and Aaron Carroll of the Incidental Economist have noted, there is less to this announcement than meets the eye. Saying you want to pay for quality instead of procedures is quite easy to say; indeed, many an administration has said so, because "paying for outcomes instead of treatment" is the holy grail of health-care economists everywhere.
During last week's State of the Union address, President Obama briefly highlighted a new "Precision Medicine Initiative," a project focused on developing more personalized therapies to treat illness. A White House press release described the approach as one that "takes into account individual differences in people's genes, environments, and lifestyles, making it possible to design highly effective, targeted treatments for cancer and other diseases."
Medical students who worked in pairs to solve diagnostic problems were more likely to arrive at the correct diagnosis than those who worked alone, German researchers found.
A handful of doctors providing medical services to students at UC San Diego — and their colleagues at nine other University of California campuses — went on strike Tuesday. It's the first time in 25 years that fully licensed doctors are picketing a U.S. employer, according to the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, which represents the physicians at the UC schools. The work stoppage began at 7:30 a.m. and is scheduled to last one day. It involves 150 health center doctors who manage the primary care and mental health needs of students.
Yesterday's announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services, setting firm targets for shifting Medicare away from fee-for-service payments, has for the most part generated positive reviews. That makes sense -- that payment structure provides incentives for excess care, and HHS is right to move past it. But that shouldn't mean the Medicare agency gets a pass on the details. There are a few reasons to wonder just how serious HHS is about these changes. First, the alternative payment structures highlighted by HHS haven't yet succeeded in pilot programs. The whole point of changing Medicare's payment method is to cut costs while increasing (or at least not hurting) quality of care.
Indiana has received federal approval to expand health coverage to about 350,000 uninsured residents through a state-run program Gov. Mike Pence said Tuesday will help the state's working poor families. Surrounded by state officials and staffers at an Indianapolis hospital, Pence announced that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had approved Indiana's waiver request for the plan his administration calls HIP 2.0. The approval makes Indiana the 28th state to expand Medicaid under President Barack Obama's health care law, and the 10th state to do so with a Republican in the governor's mansion.