I was reading an interesting article on The Health Care Blog this week, How to Pandemic-Proof Our Health Care Payment System, by Aisha Pittman and Seth Edwards, and it got me thinking about how fee for service has become a scapegoat. And since I’m on an alternative payment model (APM) kick the last few weeks (here and here), I’ll keep it going and save my evaluation of the ACP’s solutions to healthcare for the near future.
First, I need to debunk a myth. Here’s the myth: all fee-for-service (FFS) reimbursement is bad. The corollary to this is that all APMs are better. We need to stop seeing healthcare payments as dichotomous (FFS vs APMs) and start seeing them as sitting on a spectrum. This spectrum is the breadth-of-services-purchased-in-a-bundle spectrum. FFS is closer to the “narrow” end, and APMs are somewhere toward the “broad” end. But no end of the spectrum is inherently good or bad.
If FFS isn’t automatically bad and APMs aren’t automatically good, what determines whether any individual payment to a healthcare provider is good or bad? The answer: How closely it lines up with the principle of having a single payment for a single healthcare need. One payment for one job!
The patient needs a second opinion on a challenging diagnosis? One payment (that would include the doctor’s time). The patient cuts open their finger chopping vegetables? One payment (that would include nurse intake time, the doctor’s time, the lidocaine, the sutures, suture removal, etc.). The patient needs a bad knee replaced? One payment (that would include pre-op, op, and recovery care). The patient wants to have a baby? One payment (that would include all obstetric care from pre-pregnancy planning through delivery). The patient needs a year’s worth of diabetes management? One payment (that would include doctor consultations, podiatry care, lab work, etc.).
Try labeling those examples with the normal lexicon. You’ll see FFS, bundled billing, and capitation. Yet, they’re all “good” because they all require one payment for the job the patient wants the healthcare system to do for them.
How we get to that is a topic for another day, but think what could happen if we always paid one payment for one job (and if the services included in those payments were standardized from provider to provider): There could be prices advertised up front, there could be standardized quality metrics, patients could shop around for the highest value (assuming insurance plan designs don’t get in the way of the shopping incentive), higher-value providers would get more patients and make more money, competition over value would be stimulated, and our healthcare system would start naturally improving the value it is delivering year after year.
So let’s stop making FFS the scapegoat–which obscures the underlying principles–and start focusing on giving patients a single fee for a single job.
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 