We asked leading thinkers in California to address the issue of improving health care quality and access, by inviting them to begin a conversation around the following question:
How would you reform the current fee-for-service payment system to ensure that the nation rewards high quality care and better utilizes health care dollars?
Posts
Cutting Health Care Spending Will Not Save California
California is taking two steps back, while the White House is trying to ensure health reform. Instead of cutting health care, we should be making sure all children are covered and using our health care dollars to create jobs and improve health…
Health Care Insurance: What does it really get you?
What I always find amazing is that having insurance does little to protect you from liability for the cost of medical care. There is often very little correlation between charges and cost. It is more about what the market will tolerate than the cost of delivering care…
Invest in Universal Health, Not Just Health Care
What our country really needs is variation on what UCLA’s Blue Sky Health calls “Universal Coverage PLUS;” we need Universal Health. We need health systems reform and universal coverage that also addresses the social, behavioral and environmental determinants of health…
Health Reform Has to Be More than Health Coverage
Too much of the health reform debate and legislation are being framed by and for the insurance, pharmaceutical and health care industries. Where is the discussion in health reform about eliminating health care disparities, realigning the financial incentives to drive the equitable distribution of health care resources and setting standards and goals for the delivery of care?
We Cannot Achieve Quality in the Absence of Equity
For far too long, we have allowed and relied upon the medical profession and our health care institutions to monitor and assess quality while hiding behind the threat of medical malpractice, the highly technical nature of medical care and the cloak of “patient confidentiality”…
Eliminating Fee-For-Service Should Be a Given
Our health care system pays providers for the number of treatments and procedures they provide, and pays more for using expensive technology or surgical interventions. It is neither designed to reward better quality, care coordination or prevention, nor to encourage patients to get the right care at the right time…
Preventing Rather Than Treating Illness
In order to talk about reforming how providers are paid whether it is fee-for-service, capitation, or at-risk contracts, it is first necessary to talk about why we need to reform it…