Medicare Considering Performance Based Pay For Doctors And Hospitals

Medicare is considering proposals to tie more of its compensation to the quality of services from health care providers. One of the difficulties that might come up is trying to find a fair way to measure the quality of the care provided by a doctor or hospital. Some critics argue that pay for performance might actually undermine the goal of providing quality healthcare. This column discusses many of the difficulties of creating a procedure to accurately measure the quality of a health care provider’s performance. Policy makers will need to be careful about how they go about making reforms to the Medicare payment system. It is important to make sure that crucial reforms that are made to the Medicare system are done right.

See Howard Gleckman, Medicare Wants to Pay Doctors and Hospitals for Performance, But Can It Really Be Measured?, Forbes, January 29, 2016.