Authors: Joseph Antos, Katherine Baicker, Michael Chernew, Dan Crippin, David Cutler, Tom Daschle, Francois de Brantes, Dana Goldman, Glenn Hubbard, Bob Kocher, Michael Leavitt, Mark McClellan, Peter Orszag, Mark Pauly, Alice Rivlin, Leonard Schaeffer, Donna Shalala, Steve Shortell
Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform, Brookings, April 29, 2013
We propose a framework for health care reform that focuses on supporting person-centered care. With continued innovation toward more personalized care, this is the best way to improve care and health while also bending the curve of health care cost growth.
Simplify and Standardize Administrative Requirements
The time cost to clinicians of interacting with health plans has been estimated to be as high as $23 to 31 billion annually. Further, clinicians, health plans, and other participants in health care reform are currently subject to a wide range of diverse reporting requirements that add to costs and reduce the availability of actionable information. Some steps have been taken recently to reduce these administrative costs through standardization. Further administrative simplification steps should include the following, all of which can be accomplished through existing standard-setting entities and public-private implementation initiatives:
* Implementation of an updated standardized claim form.
* Standard methods for quality reporting by providers and plans, including clinical, outcome, and patient-level measures — this would be an administrative benefit for providers that adopt value-based payment reforms across all of their payment systems and would lead to reduced reliance on cumbersome coding for specific types of providers.
* Standard methods for timely data sharing by plans with health care providers and patients who are involved in the financing reforms described in this report. Data sharing accomplished according to consistent standards would reduce the burden on providers and patients, and the it vendors who serve them, for implementing the analytic tools needed to achieve greater improvements in care.
* Support for state investments to update their Medicaid information systems including standard quality measure reporting and access to CMS data for quality improvement.
Reforms for Private Health Insurance Markets and Coverage
* Support employer efforts to engage employees in reducing overall health care costs through Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and other health plan regulations that promote value-based insurance designs and tiered benefit designs, narrow networks of providers that demonstrate high performance, and employees’ ability to share in the savings from health care choices and changes in behavior that reduce costs.
Bending the Curve (49 pages):
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2013/04/person%20centered%20health%20care%20reform/person_centered_health_care_reform.pdf
Comment:
By Don McCanne, M.D.
This newest report on recommending changes to control health care costs is being presented as a “bipartisan” consensus representing “broad agreement” on reform. Those who have followed the national policy dialogue will recognize that the list of authors does, in fact, include representatives of both major political parties. Nevertheless, the views presented in the report confirms the presumption that these Democratic authors have moved into the Republican camp in the policy debate.
As an example, their recommendations for reducing administrative waste totally ignores the well documented sources of that waste, resulting in recommendations that will have no impact at all on the problem, when recovery of administrative waste should be front and center in reform.
As another an example of their right-wing approach, they recommend “value-based insurance designs and tiered benefit designs, narrow networks of providers that demonstrate high performance, and employees’ ability to share in the savings from health care choices and changes in behavior that reduce costs.” This is code language for consumer-driven approaches that shift more costs to those needing health care – terrible policies that defeat principles of health care justice.
The only good thing about this report is that you can quickly dump it with the “delete” button, without the environmental consequences of wasting 49 pages of paper.