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News Clips
The Health Care Blog (2/25) No More ‘Dabbling’: It’s Time to Embrace Value-Based Care – op-ed by Former HHS Secretary Azar – Presidential transitions are always a time of great change, but few leaders have ushered in a shift as sweeping as the rewiring of one-seventh of the U.S. economy. President Trump has the opportunity to do just that by doubling down on the health transformation achievements of his first term. A key to success is continuing the shift from a fee-for-service (FFS) health care model to value-based care. The current FFS model continues to deliver higher costs and greater utilization of health care resources—but not better outcomes for patients. By contrast, a value-based care model ties provider payments to quality patient care that incorporates prevention and coordination.
Healthcare Innovation (2/26) Medical Group Execs Detail Data Challenges With Commercial Value-Based Payment – During the Value-Based Payment Summit on Feb. 26, managers of several medical groups highlighted their successes and challenges in value-based care. They offered recommendations such as exploring ways to improve data transparency and reliability in commercial value-based contracts and working toward standardizing quality measures and reporting requirements across payers. All three panelists brought together by the Medical Group Management Association
for this event had fairly positive things to say about their experience with value-based care.
Healthcare Transformation Task Force (2/27) Principles for Consumerism in Value-Based Care – The Patient-Centered Priorities Work Group developed a set of Principles for Consumerism in Value-Based Care that aim to ensure consumerism approaches are patient-centered and equitable. These seven principles can be used as a benchmark or checklist by health care stakeholders, including payers and providers, to assess whether their consumerism approaches truly empower patients as partners in their care.
Health Affairs (3/3) Physician Turnover Increased In Private Equity–Acquired Physician Practices – Consolidation of physician practices by private equity (PE) firms has accelerated, raising concerns that PE’s emphasis on short-term profitability may exacerbate physician turnover, with implications for care continuity. Despite their significance, evidence on how PE acquisitions affect physician turnover is limited. PE acquisitions also increased physician turnover, with the share of physicians leaving PE-acquired practices from one year to another increasing by 13 percentage points, or 265 percent, after acquisition, relative to non-PE-acquired practices. As PE expands its footprint, policy makers should monitor the long-term implications of PE ownership on physician employment and turnover to mitigate potential undesirable effects on patient health.
Boston Herald (3/5) Trump revives hospital, insurer price transparency oversight push – Medicare beneficiaries face a big challenge that gets worse every year: difficulty seeing a doctor because of Congress’ inability to reform the Medicare physician payment framework. Reimbursement cuts have damaged the financial viability of many medical practices, threatening their ability to stay open. This isn’t just some run-of-the-mill bureaucratic issue – it’s a pressing emergency undermining seniors’ access to efficient, high-quality medical care. Unlike other Medicare providers, physicians do not receive a yearly adjustment to offset rising inflation, which has been higher than any time since the 1970s. On top of inflation, doctors’ operational costs increase at an even faster rate. This means the lack of legislative action to increase Medicare reimbursement is driving medical practices – particularly independent doctors – out of business.
Modern Healthcare (3/5) Medicare reimbursement cuts driving out docs – President Donald Trump last week issued an executive order to bolster oversight of price transparency requirements enacted in 2021. Regulators have given too much leeway to hospitals and insurers, limiting the potential price-easing benefits of the law as health care companies have been slow to meet the requirements, Trump said in the order. Trump gave the administration 90 days to issue new rules or guidance to ensure pricing data is easily comparable across health systems and insurers, require estimates of services be replaced with actual prices and strengthen enforcement for noncompliance. If the directives come to fruition, health systems will need to spend more and dedicate more resources to compile price transparency data, advisers said.
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