Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, secretary of health and human services in Massachusetts, thinks she has found a blueprint to show the rest of the country. Since Mass was the first experimental state for our new healthcare system, they have taken it upon themselves to brainstorm a new way to pay hospitals and doctors. They would like to scrap the old "fee for service plan" for a system they call "global payments". It would be a new "cost-conscious payment system that would essentially put providers on a budget for each patient’s care and require doctors, hospitals, and other providers to band together into groups called accountable care organizations that would split the payments and better coordinate patient care, thereby improving quality" Gee, that sounds familiar. What was that called decades ago? Oh, yeah, CAPITATED CARE.
And it failed miserably.
Posts
