Medicare Plan for Payments Irks Hospitals.

[elleng]

For the first time in its history, Medicare will soon track spending on millions of individual beneficiaries, reward hospitals that hold down costs and penalize those whose patients prove most expensive.

The administration plans to establish “Medicare spending per beneficiary” as a new measure of hospital performance, just like the mortality rate for heart attack patients and the infection rate for surgery patients.

Hospitals could be held accountable not only for the cost of the care they provide, but also for the cost of services performed by doctors and other health care providers in the 90 days after a Medicare patient leaves the hospital.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/health/policy/31hospital.html?hpw

[Scuba]

1. Noble, but be careful....

...as physicians direct simple cases to their for-profit hospitals and complicated cases to St. Elsewhere it causes all kinds of problems. This is particularly problematic in cardiac care, with heart docs building their own hospitals, then cherry picking the best cases.

[elleng]

2. Right, hugely difficult to implement well, nation-wide.

[Maine_Nurse]

3. I understand trying to reign in costs, but...

every human out there is different in how their bodies react to illness and damage. Just because the "gold standard" treatment works well on many people doesn't mean it will help everyone. I have seen patients who are in horrible health have an easy time of a serious infection, and I have also seen seemingly healthy people that just can't shake an illness, no matter how good their care. This is akin to lumping every type of automobile together and saying that annual repair costs on a 4wd truck that has been abused for 200k miles should be the same as on a Honda Civic driven by grandma to church every weekend. This isn't really fair to healthcare providers, but what is worse is that it will be the patients that get screwed the worst.

[Demeter]

4. This is a stupid idea, invented by an accountant

most stupid ideas in this country are invented by accountants, who know the cost of everything, and the value of nothing.