Oct 16, 2013 BETHESDA, Md. -- Serious payment reform in this country -- whenever it comes and in whatever form -- needs to retain some form of fee-for-service, the leading culprit of the ongoing health spending spree, a health policy expert said.
Fee-for-service provides some accounting system to help payers divide the risk-adjusted capitation payments the payment system is inching toward, according to Len Nichols, PhD, director of the Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
"If you abolished all fee-for-service tomorrow, you abolished all those codes, you'd have no clue what's going on out there," Nichols said Tuesday at the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative Fall Conference. "You don't have much of a clue now, but at least you have a rough idea."
Nichols delivered the sentiment during the closing keynote address entitled "The Politics and Policy of Payment Reform."
He said the hangup in payment reform is getting players in healthcare -- hospitals, physicians, and otherwise -- to know they're better off in some reform effort than they are today. Not making that happen is the fundamental problem today, Nichols said.
All the tools for transformation are present, he added. It's just a matter of getting entities on the same page.
