Video and text: Leslie Dach, a former Wal-Mart executive, is a senior counselor to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell. He discussed with The Wall Street Journal how how healthcare policy is evolving.
Among his remarks:
“{W}e want to incentivize the system to pay for quality and not quantity. We want to incentivize care to be integrated and organized.
“The hip-and-joint bundle is a perfect one announced in final form yesterday. Billions of dollars are spent every year in America under Medicare and private insurance on hip and joint [replacement]. These are operations that can be quite painful. Recovery takes time. Under the old system, we would reimburse for the operation. The concept here is to ask the provider to be responsible for a 90-day period, an episode of care, so that they integrate the care down through rehab. If they do that well, they make more money. If they don’t do it as well, they have an economic risk. And that’s been welcome, frankly, by the hospital system and others.”
