In a letter sent this week, the Health Care Transformation Task Force is asking the Trump administration to continue efforts to replace fee-for-service payment models with value-based care.
The group, which includes patients, payers, providers and purchasers, says that payment and care-delivery innovation have been supported on a bi-partisan basis and asked that President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President-elect Mike Pence and congressional affirm that the support will continue.
“Given the significant industry investment and strong progress to date, we urge the new Administration and Congress to send signals of support and encouragement so this transition can be sustained. This is not the time for policymakers to waver or reverse course, which would send a negative message to the industry and chill ongoing transformation efforts,” the task force wrote.
The group said that sustainable value-based payment models depend on “aligning private-sector and public-sector efforts.” And they lauded the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation as a public-sector entity that has dramatically advanced payment and care-delivery transformation. But many Republicans have vowed to kill that institution.
A challenge: Many very highly compensated physicians, especially specialists, and other affluent providers and healthcare executives, seem to have the ear of the very rich folks who will be running the federal government under Mr. Trump. They will push back hard against anything that might reduce their personal and institutional incomes.
An example is Tom Price, M.D., a rich former orthopedic surgeon who implied that he’d fight anything that would curtail incomes of U.S. physicians, who are by far the highest paid in the world. These groups have hugely benefited from the traditional fee-for-service system — a system that encourages vast amounts of waste and duplication and produces among the worst population-health metrics in the Developed World.
To read the letter, please hit this link.
