Off to New Orleans for client meetings; should be interesting spending Halloween evening downtown.
A couple tems of note that deserve mention.
Over the weekend 178 GOP and 1 Dem representative called on CMS to stop with all the value-based stuff. Claiming the agency is overstepping its bounds, a letter signed by these worthies evidently wants Medicare to return to fee for service.
In a word, this is dumb. FFS is a big reason health care costs are out of control while quality is spotty at best. Fiscal prudence would seem to demand rapid adoption of value-based care. I know taxpayers will be far better served when more care is based on what actually works, not on what providers can bill for.
CompPharma’s annual Survey of Prescription Drug Management in Workers Comp will be out tomorrow at CompPharma.com. Big news is respondents’ drug costs dropped 8.7% in 2015. Opioids are still the biggest concern and compounds the top emerging issue.
Finally it looks like occupational injuries declined yet again; the Department of Labor reported the injury rate dropped from 3.2/100 to 3.0.
That is good news indeed – especially for those workers who didn’t get hurt.
Hope your week is most excellent.
Note- sorry about no URL links; posting from my phone which makes that really complicated.
I understand moving away from the FFS model as I agree fiscal prudence needs to be addressed. However, I do feel that many good providers are being pushed out due to this desire to save money. Saving money does not mean better care. I would actually tend to argue that it makes care worst as providers will be understaffed to serve the very high demands of their clients. This can be seen in competitive bidding as patients are left struggling to find companies to service them as more and more providers exit the Medicare arena.
Thanks for the comment Rick – Certainly saving money does not ALWAYS equal “better care”. However the well-documented over-utilization of care certainly implies there is excess capacity in the system. Undoubtedly there is always under-capacity as well in some areas. As ACA and market forces shake out the market, we will see painful but necessary changes.