While there’s broad agreement that American healthcare must move away from the still dominant and astronomically expensive fee-for-service system and toward “payment for value” (including, for example, bundled payments), there’s confusion on how to do it, as this Capital New York article discusses:
It notes:
“{T}here is no broad agreement as to what ‘value’ means, how it will be measured or how it will be audited.”
“Some of {New York State’s} leading healthcare actors feel they’re racing toward a goal they don’t quite understand.”
‘“People keep talking about how we’re going to get there,’ said Stephen Berger, chairman and founder of Odyssey Investment Partners, L.L.C., a private equity firm, and chairman of the New York State Commission on Healthcare Facilities in the 21st Century. ‘I don’t know where ‘there’ is. And I think there is not one ‘there.’ There is a lot of ‘theres,’ and I’m concerned that a great deal of what we are counting on depends upon being able to have some more clear discussable, understandable definitions of things like quality.”’
