Paying for Quality

Quality and Cost are Two Pillars of Effective Healthcare  

We are bombarded with two messages about the healthcare we deliver in America; care is too expensive and the “quality” of that care is not as good as that of care in many other industrialized nations. The issue of cost was fodder for my previous post and, I’m certain, for many subsequent posts. Right now, though, I would like to focus on “quality”. What is quality? Is it as defined by Webster “degree of excellence; superiority in kind”? Or, when asked to define “quality”, would most of us respond as did Justice Potter Stewart when he wrestled with the definition of “hard core pornography” in Jacobellis vs.Ohio, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it...” The definition of “quality”... continue reading...