Insurance Coverage & Costs
Costs
The Uninsured
Private Coverage
Employer Sponsored
Individual
Public Coverage
Medicare
Medicaid and SCHIP
Access to Care
Quality & Care Delivery
Health Care Markets
Issue Briefs
Data Bulletins
Research Briefs
Policy Analyses
Community Reports
Journal Articles
Other Publications
Surveys
Site Visits
Design and Methods
Data Files
Reforming Provider Payment—The Price Side of the Equation
Oct. 6, 2011
New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 365, No. 14
Paul B. Ginsburg
It’s pretty basic economics: spending equals price times quantity. For some time, public health care payers, such as Medicare and Medicaid, have focused much of their cost-containment effort on constraining the prices they pay for health care services, which they set administratively. The Affordable Care Act includes additional constraints on Medicare prices as an important source of savings. But public payers recognize the limits of this strategy and hope to develop better methods of paying providers—such as bundled payment for episodes of care and payments to accountable care organizations (ACOs) and patient-centered medical homes—that will create incentives for treating patients using services more efficiently.
Access to this article is available at the New England Journal of Medicine Web site. (Free access.)
