Paying for What Works

Paying for Treatments That "Work"  

From time to time I have heard a politician or a healthcare executive say that the best path to reform of the healthcare system is to pay physicians and hospitals to keep us healthy. I assume this means that payments for illness would be somehow reduced and our focus would be shifted from "illness care" to "wellness". Of course, this sounds great; pay the providers to keep me healthy and my illnesses will be few and minor. Healthcare costs will drop dramatically and we'll all live in a utopia of health and have plenty of money left over to fund the National Institutes of Health so that researchers can get more grants to study things that keep us healthy, right? Clearly, this is silly. Many factors, some of which interact with one another in still mysterious ways cause "good health" and "poor health". The distillation of this complex collection of... continue reading...