Today’s New York Times has an editorial entitled “Quality Care at Bargain Prices” that focuses on the findings from the most recently updated Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. The editorial concludes:
Reducing the cost of medical care will require changing longstanding habits — no easy feat. It may not happen until the medical profession reaches consensus on which treatments will truly improve the health of patients and which are superfluous. The Dartmouth researchers estimate that Medicare could save tens of billions of dollars annually — without reducing the quality of care — if all hospitals mirrored the practice patterns of the Mayo Clinic. That is a very good reason to change.
Here is the press release from The Dartmouth Institute announcing its findings. The Times’ editorial lends support to Mayo Clinic leaders’ call for payment reform, what they call “Pay for Value,” that considers both cost and quality in determining how health care services are reimbursed.
Sacrificing quality to meet budget targets isn’t a desirable solution to the problem of rising health care costs. The good news, as the Times and Dartmouth have pointed out, is it isn’t necessary either.
One Comment
How you think when the economic crisis will end? I wish to make statistics of independent opinions!
One Trackback
[...] perspective on producing high-value health care through payment reform, see this post about a related New York Times editorial. This entry was written by leeaase, posted on July 17, 2008 at 6:35 pm, filed under Payment [...]