It is ever more widely accepted that fee for service medicine, that is payment for individual services that medical professionals provide, by patients or by insurers, is a bad idea. If a physician is paid to deliver a specific service, such as seeing a patient in the office, removing his or her gallbladder or doing a colonoscopy, the physician will perform more of these services, regardless of whether this improves the health of the patient. Ethically a doctor may make appropriate choices, but financially the reward will be for quantity of services not quality of care. If a health care provider is paid to take care of a patient, a flat fee per patient per year for instance, the incentive will be to keep that patient as healthy as possible with as little medical intervention as possible and to prevent costly disease. This is known as "capitation" (literally paying by the head.) Capitation has been tried and used in many situations over many years in medicine. Staff model hea...
The cost of health care in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world, and yet we are not healthier than our peer nations. In fact, in terms of such measures as infant mortality and life span, we don't measure up. Why is this? Many people involved in providing or receiving care have some pretty good ideas about what costs so much, and what we can do to reduce costs and improve quality. Sharing these stories is an important step in creating affordable universal health care.