Serious and costly performance problems riddle U.S. health care. Because of overuse, under use, and misuse of health care, researchers at the Juran Institute and elsewhere estimate that about 30 percent of health care costs are generated by poor quality. Therefore, poor quality medical care will cost about $720 billion in 2008 (30% of $2.4 trillion).

Poor quality also reduces productivity. For every dollar of health care spending caused by poor quality, poor care costs an estimated 50 cents in lost productivity. When applied to the $822 billion in care provided through employer-sponsored insurance, this translates to an additional $123 billion in costs.

A recent study by the Health Research Institute at PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that wasteful health care spending costs $1.2 trillion annually. Analyzing findings from a wealth of published studies, the PwC researchers looked at the cost of waste from clinically inappropriate care and overt errors, individual behaviors leading to costly health problems, and antiquated operational processes that add costs without providing any value.

Making matters worse, research on the care patients receive from physicians, hospitals, and other providers paints a frustrating, even scary picture. For example, studies conducted by the respected RAND Corporation show that Americans receive clinically inadequate or inappropriate care at shockingly high rates.

Specifically, RAND's research shows that acute care for insured adults is appropriate only 53.5 percent of the time on average. In other words, about 46 percent of acute care is clinically incorrect. Similarly, about 43.9 percent of chronic care and 45.1 percent of preventive care is inappropriate according to accepted medical standards. Children receive 68 percent of recommended care for acute medical problems, 53 percent of recommended care for chronic medical conditions, and 41 percent of recommended preventive care.

The bottom line is health care - whether for adults or children - is inappropriate or unnecessary about half the time. Basically, it's a coin flip.

Root Causes of Poor Quality, High Costs:

Ultimately, three immutable laws of economics explain the underlying causes of this poor performance:

1. Price is what you pay but value is what you get:

Taking a page from Warren Buffet's playbook, buyers of health benefits must focus on value, not price. Price is an important part of the equation but meaningless if you don't know the value of what you are receiving for that price. Unfortunately, in health care we obsess on unit prices. In no other marketplace or domain of life do Americans - corporations, consumers, federal and state policymakers, news media - pay so much attention to price and so little to value.

2. You get what you pay for:

Today, we pay for quantity, not quality. Poor performers are sustained and rewarded. The best performers are financially penalized and professionally demoralized. The consequences are all too obvious.

3. You can't fix what you can't see:

In sharp contrast to virtually every other industry, health care is highly opaque. American health care is full of decision makers - consumers, physicians, and other providers, health plans, public officials - who lack the information needed to make decisions.

Five Steps to Higher Performance:

The problems are daunting but solvable. To improve the quality and cost effectiveness of health care delivery, purchasers and payors must tightly focus on strategies to expect, measure, disclose, reward, and support results:

1. Expect Results:

2. Measure Results:

3. Disclose Results:

4. Reward Results:

5. Support Results:

Support the infrastructure and processes essential to results-driven health care. These include:

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) - the influential independent Congressional agency charged with advising Congress on a wide range of Medicare policy issues - has released its Medicare payment policy recommendations for 2009. The 355-page report includes a weath of information for those tracking Medicare provider or health plan issues, particularly annual provider payment updates, reforms to Medicare Advantage, and quality incentives.

In summary, here are MedPAC's recommendations to Congress:

Hospital Inpatient and Outpatient Services:

Physician Services:

Outpatient Dialysis Services:

Skilled Nursing Facility Services:

Home Health Services:

Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility Services:

Long-Term Care Hospital Services:

Medicare Advantage Special Needs Plans:

Part D Enrollment, Benefit Offerings, and Drug Plan Payments:

Medicare Savings Programs and Part D Low-Income Drug Subsidy:

To read the full MedPAC report, click here (large PDF file).

In the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA), Congress authorized the new $150 million Medicaid Transformation Grant Program to help states design and implement reforms to increase quality and efficiency of Medicaid. This is a unique opportunity to help states restructure and modernize Medicaid, save taxpayer dollars, and improve services. But states must act fast to take advantage.

State Medicaid agencies may submit grant proposals to CMS by September 15, 2006. For grants, CMS has a total budget of $75 million in FFY 2007 and another $75 million in FFY 2008. The amount of each grant will vary and will depend on the number of applications received. State matching funds are not required.

While states have wide discretion in proposing projects and may propose multiple projects in a single grant application, CMS is encouraging states to look at ways to improve Medicaid program operations and efficiency.

In the area of improving Medicaid program efficiency, CMS is particularly interested in grant projects to:

CMS is also interested in projects to improve the effectiveness of Medicaid. Examples include projects on:

In the arena of improved care delivery, CMS is particularly interested in grant proposals to:

This is a unique, one-time opportunity for states but, with grant applications due in six weeks, the timeline is tight. States needing help or advice in writing an application may contact me or my friends at Sellers Feinberg for assistance.

The world's leading guru of competitive strategy, Michael Porter, Ph.D., has turned his sights on explaining the fundamental cause of high costs, poor quality, consumer dissatisfaction, uneven access, and skyrocketing premiums in American health care.

In Redefining Health Care, Porter and innovation expert Elizabeth Teisberg, Ph.D. provide a thoughtful, groundbreaking framework to use competition to drive dramatic increases in quality and efficiency.

Unlike many wonks who foolishly believe that health care is not a market, Drs. Porter and Teisberg see competition " of a sort " in operation. They show us that the current competitive environment in health care is designed to "shift costs, accumulate bargaining power, and restrict services." That is, what we have now is dysfunctional, zero-sum competition serving to limit, even reduce value for patients. And they see all this taking place "...at the wrong level-among health plans, networks, and hospitals " rather than where it matters most, in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of specific health conditions."

Focusing on how to move American health care to positive-sum competition based on economic and clinical value for patients, Redefining Health Care provides a series of specific recommendations for the key players " including physicians, hospitals, health plans, employers, Medicare, and Medicaid.

It is an immutable truth of economics. Transparency is an essential ingredient for a market to function with any semblance of efficiency or effectiveness. Lack of transparency - what economists call asynchronous information - leads to rapid inflation, gross inefficiency, gaming and abuse, ignorant consumers, poor quality, rampant error rates, and misaligned resources. In other words, you get America's $1.9 trillion health care system.

After years of behind the scenes work by top health care thought leaders, the White House and key Congressional leaders are jumping on board and calling for reforms to ensure transparency (read public reporting) of health care provider prices. While prices are only part of the information needs of patients, purchasers, and payors, nationwide transparency of medical prices is essential. Health Savings Accounts and other consumer-driven health reforms such as Medicaid Health Opportunity Accounts are largely pointless in a health care system otherwise rooted in incomplete, inaccurate, and inaccessible information.

As leaders contemplate specific measures to promote transparency of prices, they should also consider sending every Medicaid and Medicare beneficiary a quarterly report on the cost of their care. (I am not talking about Explanation of Benefits [EOB] notices. EOBs don't give a picture of their overall costs or utilization and offer no comparative, trend, or historical information.)

Using simple, colorful charts and tables and an emphasis on decision relevant information, a well-designed report would show them what care they received, what providers charged, what public programs paid, how much they paid in cost sharing, and how their medical costs compare to their peers (age group, sex, health status, and geography).

For Medicare beneficiaries, the reports could help bust a core myth of Medicare financing by showing what Medicare has paid for their care compared to what as an individual they paid in Medicare taxes and cost-sharing to date. In Medicaid, the reports would be invaluable to state efforts to move toward consumer-directed models where chronically ill or disabled patients and their families take active control of their medical lives. It would also help low-income families better understand the health care system. For dual eligibles - the 6.3 million Americans with annual health costs of a quarter trillion dollars - these personalized reports would be truly eye opening for patients and their families.

Over time, the reports could help Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries see how their providers, health plans, and drug plans compare on measures of quality, errors, and cost effectiveness. And they could include simple health reminders.

Of course, not every benie would read the reports much less change their behavior based on the information. But the vary act of creating the reports would require Medicare and Medicaid to modernize information systems, turn transaction data into genuine decision-relevant information, and begin thinking of program beneficiaries as consumers in need of more than monstrously dull doorstops masquerading as handbooks.

Americans, including Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries, are not stupid. But when it comes to health care costs, they are too often ignorant or oblivious. That must stop. Yes, there is a learning curve and some people prefer the bliss of ignorance to the dilemmas of judgment. Nonetheless, as consumers, as Americans, as human beings we are entitled to the information we need to make decisions. Keeping Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries and their families in the dark is as costly as it is insulting.

1. You get what you pay for.

2. Price is what you pay but value is what you get.

3. You can't fix what you can't see.

4. Incentives matter, whether you intend them to or not.

5. No matter what they say, it's always about money and autonomy.

6. There are no essential providers, only essential services.

7. More is rarely better and often worse.

8. Health care providers are not your children. You are under no obligation to treat them the same for different performance.

9. If you pay them, they will come. If you don't pay them, they'll come anyway and it will cost you.

10. Never let a health plan or provider do what you would do if you were they.

11. Uninformed choice is not choice.

12. It's all in the execution and in the communication of the execution.

13. Health care is a game of chess. The player who thinks the most moves ahead wins.

14. Health care policy making is like puppetry. If you can see the strings it doesn't work.

15. In health politics, complexity and chaos can be your friends or you enemies. Your choice.

16. Death is always cheaper than life but rarely preferable.

17. Until they award a Nobel Prize for health policy, style rules substance and perception rules reality.

18. Health care policy is an art - but more sculpture than painting. What you leave out is more important than what you put in.

19. Get paid for what is in your control but only pay for what is outside theirs.

20. Results matter. Period.

By Michael H. Bailit, MBA
President of Bailit Health Purchasing, LLC

Introduction

The serious problems in our health care system have been more than adequately documented in this journal and many others over the two past decades. Rates of uninsurance rise with a steadiness fueled by costs that seemingly know no bound. Quality varies with little or any relationship to cost, and ill-informed consumers cannot be confident that they are receiving the care that they need.

It initially appears astounding that that these problems are not getting resolved despite the well-intended efforts of many, many people. In fact with respect to cost growth and insurance coverage, the problems with our health care system are getting worse. Much worse. We who work in the field of health policy have failed.

Yet, the reasons for this failure are not difficult to understand. The health care industry represents a whopping 14.9% of the GDP (Levit, Smith, Cowan, Sensenig, and Catlin, 2004). It is an economic monolith, that becomes larger and, hence, more difficult to change every day. There are two sectors which foot the growing health care bill, neither of which is up to the challenge of curbing the expansion: government and employers.

Government

"One person's waste is another person's income.' (Wasson, 2004)

Federal and state government pay the largest share of the health care bill. They fight valiantly to control health expenditure growth, but rarely, if ever, by addressing the problem. Instead government purchasers often end up shifting costs to private payers. States and the federal government also reduce covered health care services in times of profound economic hardship. Finally, state and federal government assume loans (especially the federal government) and cut other service expenditures to meet the growing demand for health care dollars.

Ultimately, however, government fails to manage the growth of health care costs for two primary reasons. First, constituting a large economic sector, health care employs many Americans, thus creating a mission conflict for those elected and appointed to serve us. Reductions in healthcare expenditures result in lower income and potentially reduced employment for many Americans, including some who are politically influential. Second, most Americans don't want health cost growth restricted since the impact of costs is not directly visible to most Americans. That is, American taxpayers don't appear to appreciate how growing health care costs reduce available funds for other government programs and contribute to government debt.

To continue reading, click here.

Congress could improve the newly created Medicare prescription drug benefit by applying the lessons of welfare reform, according to an excellent new article by Paul Barringer.

In American Outlook, the Hudson Institute's quarterly journal, Mr. Barringer lays out what made welfare reform successful:

● Pay for performance: bonuses for performing well across a spectrum of quality measures.

● Encouraging partnerships with local organizations and key players.

● Administrative flexibility.

● Block grant approach to finances.

● Emphasizing evidence-based practices.

In a great example of out-of-the-box thinking, Paul Barringer makes a thoughtful, persuasive case for applying these same reforms to make the Medicare drug program more beneficial for seniors and taxpayers.

The pay-for-performance (P4P) movement continues to grow:

1. The Medicare Payment Assessment Commission (MedPAC) is calling on Congress to incorporate quality incentives in Medicare payments to hospitals, physicians, and home health agencies. In 2003, MedPAC released similar P4P recommendations for Medicare managed care plans and dialysis facilities. MedPAC says the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) should earmark between 1% and 2% of Medicare payments to pay bonuses to providers that meet specific quality measures. The quality incentives would into account the severity of patients' illnesses.

2. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) released principles for constructing pay-for-performance programs to align provider reimbursement with quality of care.

3. The American Medical Association released a new report to get physicians ready for pay-for-performance. The report says pay-for-performance is a "tsunami building offshore in a sea of stakeholder unrest, threatening those who are not prepared."

Medicaid health plans are the Ginger Rogers of managed care. They have to do everything commercial and Medicare health plans do but have to do it backwards and in high heels. Despite dealing with more complex requirements and the toughest, most vulnerable patient populations, Medicaid health plans often provide higher quality and better access to care than their commercial counterparts.

To reward the highest performing health plans, state Medicaid agencies are increasingly using a new tool - performance-based auto-assignment. Auto-assignment is when new Medicaid beneficiaries are automatically assigned to a health plan when they don't voluntarily select a plan within the required time frame. While a state may simply assign new patients randomly among available plans, it may also use auto-assignment to incentivize the best health plans with increased enrollment. The better the perform, the greater the plan's proportion of auto-assigned enrollees.

Michael Bailit, CEO of Bailit Health Purchasing LLC and a leading expert on Medicaid and employer managed care, says for auto-assignment to work as an incentive additional assignment volume must be desired by the health plans. States must also:

- Establish clear goals at the outset and involve stakeholders early in the process.
- Focus on data that is reliable and measures that can be audited.
- Revisit measures on a regular basis and view the algorithm as something that is modifiable.
- View auto-assignment as an incentive strategy that can be use in complimentary fashion with other incentive strategies.

With the help of Bailit Health Purchasing, California Medicaid (MediCal) is developing a performance-based auto-assignment program. Starting in 2005, MediCal will use the approach to reward health plans with superior performance (relative to other health plans in the county), create a quality improvement incentive for all plans, and support the preservation of the safety net. Medicaid programs in Michigan and New York state already have experience using auto-assignment to drive quality improvement.

When the new Medicare prescription drug benefit begins in January 2006, 7 million dual eligibles (persons enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid) will receive their drug benefits through prescription drug plans (PDPs). If they don't select a PDP, Medicare will auto-assign them into a plan. Given the positive experience of state Medicaid programs, Medicare may wish to consider using performance-based auto-assignment to help drive drug plan quality.

To address the enormous deficiencies in quality of health care, health care organizations need to make a business care for improvement. That is, they need to demonstrate a compelling rationale for the significant financial investments necessary to improve quality and reduce medical errors.

To make decisions, businesses traditionally look at the potential return on investment (ROI). However, ROI projections are tough to make in health care. Data sources are limited and decision support tools are often outdated or nonexistent. Most health services research is purely academic, offering no actionable or timely advice to decision makers. The fragmented delivery system means that organizations that invest in performance improvement benefit other players more than themselves. Finally and most critically, incentives are terribly misaligned. Providers are paid for how much they do, not how well they do it. When patient care improves and medical mistakes decline, provider revenues can drop like a stone.

The savvy folks at Bailit Health Purchasing LLC offer a new framework for building a business care to invest in quality improvement. In an excellent new issue brief published by The Commonwealth Fund, Michael Bailit, MBA and Mary Beth Dyer, MPP provide “a mechanism for an organization to consider a broad set of factors affecting a business case for quality.”

Taking into account key financial, strategic, and organization factors, they offer 10 practical business care arguments. By looking beyond bankable dollars, hospitals, clinics, and other providers can create compelling business cases to improve their performance.

The June 2004 issue of the Harvard Business Review contains an outstanding article on Redefining Competition in Health Care by Michael E. Porter, Ph.D. of the Harvard Business School and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg, Ph.D. of the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business.

Their carefully researched, well-argued, actionable recommendations include:

- Standardized information about individual diseases and treatments should be collected and disseminated widely so patients can make informed choices.

- Purchasers, providers, and health plans should establish transparent billing and pricing to reduce cost shifting, confusion, pricing discrimination, and a host of other inefficiencies.

- Providers should be experts in specific conditions and treatments rather than try to be all things to all patients.