Blame for our healthcare nightmare has recently been aimed at the doctors: inadvertently by Dr. Atul Gawande in the New Yorker magazine and intentionally by Peter Orszag of the Federal Budget Office on Charlie Rose (6/15/09).
Why do doctors "perform" inappropriately? That is, why do they over- or under-use technology? Why do patients insist on technology? Because incentives affect human behaviors. Health care providers are human, and so are patients.
The Obama Administration is considering implementing the pay-for-performance approach initiated by the British National Health Service (NHS). If you read the early experience reported by the NHS (which the Washington administration obviously has not), you will see the problems the NHS has discovered with this badly flawed idea.
Before going along with pay-for-performance, ask yourself three questions.
What outcomes do we want?
The outcomes that health care carefully tracks are: dying; having an adverse impact; length of wait in the ER; filing bankruptcy because of medical bills; and lawsuits. These are precisely the outcomes we do not want.
I apologize in advance for the following double negatives but they make a point. Our preferred outcomes from health care are not: not dying; not filing bankruptcy; not having a complication; not filing a lawsuit.
Our preferred outcomes from health care are positives: living a long time; being healthy; and quick as well as full restoration of our health and function when we get sick.
What behaviors should they reward?
Incentives are tools to encourage or discourage behaviors. Whichever behaviors get us the outcomes we want are obviously the ones to which health care should offer strong incentives.
Which behaviors do they reward or punish?
What are the incentives -- rewards or punishments -- that the current system uses to direct behaviors of health care people?
Managers in health care are rewarded with "performance bonuses" for spending less money. You know what this mean for your health care services. There are no punishments for bad decisions.
Pay-for-Performance
Pay-for-performance means that hospitals and doctors will get paid (rewarded) for what they do, and not paid (punished) for adverse outcomes. In that system, why would any provider ever agree to care for a diabetic smoker, a patient with colon cancer, or a person with liver cirrhosis? Can you imagine a better way to make health care people avoid absolutely all risks, even when the riskier plan might be better for the patient?
Some consider risk a bad thing in health care, but only those who wish to stay in the dark ages of medicine. How do you think health care discovered childbed fever; cured childhood leukemia; developed arterial stents; created Lipitor; and 'found' the catheter and the laparascope? Answer: by talking risks, reasonable ones but medical, financial, and personal risks nonetheless.
What should health care pay for (reward)?
Pay-for-performance rewards an activity rather than a result or an outcome. Remember the aphorism what they reward is what we get? With pay-for-performance, we get performance. With "pay-for-outcome" (which does not presently exist), we get what we want: health.
Healthcare should pay for [reward] what we want: healthy outcomes.
Follow Deane Waldman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dwaldman@thesys
I also think he's right that we need to provide incentives for good outcomes. Most of our healthcare system is proceedure based; there is little monetary incentive for docs to encourage prevention, or help manage chronic illness. There needs to be a balance- fees for activity (office visits, etc) but also carrots and sticks. Personally, I think this is huge if we want real reform.
But he falls short of saying what he DOES want. How does a healthy outcome system work? And why would his system induce doctors to treat for a diabetic or chirrhotic patient, when a pay for performance system wouldn't?
To me, his system does not appear substantively different from pay-for-performance.
We should pay for what we want. That means as follows.
1. Pay for (reward) being/staying healthy, which means preventative care; check-ups; and an anual stipend for not getting sick.
2. Pay for sickness care, yes, but the quicker and 'fuller' the recovery, the more the doctor and hospital get ($$).
3. Tax (for a non-profit-generating) risk pool to cover everyone and include higher cost for "personally controllable health risk factors" such as smoking and obesity [and yes, I know that some have endocrine conditions they cannot help but they are the vast minority].
4. Start viewing (and handling) our people like what they are: infrastructure to be maintained and upgraded, like bridges and roads. WE are the real productive force in the USA and should be treated as such by the CEO of corporation USA – the President. Instead our health care is a line item cost, which they try to minimize saying they are "reducing costs" when they are trying not to pay for the maintenance and upgrades in [human] infrastructure. If they ever starting doing net long-term cost/benefit analysis on our healthcare, what I propose would be obviously the thing to do.