Health Care Payment Reform

RAND researchers writing in the New England Journal of Medicine give a big thumbs-up for bundled payments to replace fee-for-service medicine.

In an article titled “Controlling U.S. Health Care Spending — Separating Promising from Unpromising Approaches,” the researchers estimated the likely impact of 12 policy options:

Bundled payment provides a mechanism for reducing both the volume of services and the prices charged for them. We estimate that under optimistic scenarios and with broad use of the Prometheus model³ of bundled payment for six chronic conditions and four acute conditions or procedures requiring hospitalization, national health care spending could be reduced by 5.4% between 2010 and 2019.