Recent activity in Washington—from the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act now moving through the Senate, to the House Ways and Means Committee hearing with Hospital CEOs in April—illustrates that dissatisfaction with the current state of healthcare delivery continues to grow. While pricing and affordability are the most visible part of…
As I have covered in the first three columns of this series, the recent House Ways and Means Committee hearing exposed frustration with hospital pricing and affordability and highlighted that policymakers, employers and consumers are increasingly questioning the ability of the current healthcare business model to deliver value. Healthcare leaders…
The recent House Ways and Means Committee hearing reflected something larger than frustration with hospital pricing. It exposed a growing recognition that decades of effort trying to reform healthcare have produced mounting cost, rising dissatisfaction and little confidence that the current model can deliver results. Healthcare leaders should stop treating…
The House Ways and Means Committee hearing in late April signaled growing bipartisan frustration with a healthcare system that continues to produce rising costs without demonstrating better value, accountability or outcomes for employers, taxpayers and patient-consumers. Healthcare delivery organizations should treat this moment as an opportunity to redesign how they…
When hospital CEOs appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee in late April, lawmakers were not content with conducting a traditional oversight hearing. They were signaling growing bipartisan frustration with a healthcare delivery system that has spent decades promising affordability improvements while costs continue to climb. For more than…
CMS introduced Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRGs) in the early 1980s with the promise of bending the proverbial healthcare cost curve. It was the start of a prospective payment system aimed at ending the ‘usual and customary’ retrospective reimbursement system. Under this new model hospitals were paid a flat rate for treating…
