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We MUST change how we pay for healthcare in the U.S.
Decades of experiments prove that our current system doesn’t work
Every decade or two, U.S. healthcare industry talking heads insist that this time, they’ve found a way to make money and deliver great patient care.
The latest strategy getting healthcare execs worked up is the value-based care model, which assumes that if providers are paid to deliver good health outcomes rather every service they deliver and test they order, everybody wins.
If you read the breathless articles pumped out by consulting firms, health insurance companies and industry seers, you’d think we were on the brink of a massive breakthrough — that is, unless you’ve been around long enough to see a baker’s dozen of previous models fail.
In reality, this is just one of the countless times the industry has attempted to reinvent how providers get paid. And after watching this happen over and over again, I’ve become convinced that we’re wasting our time.
The truth is that if we want to change healthcare, we really have to rebuild it more or less from the ground up, and completely rethink how it’s financed. Otherwise, we’ll never be able to get healthcare costs, quality and access into line with the other industrialized countries of the world.
For several decades, the people who pay for healthcare — largely health insurers, employers and the government — have been working to tame the staggering growth in healthcare costs.