Healthcare Incentives Quotes

Medical costs are soaring because our health-care system is totally screwed up. Doctors and hospitals have every incentive to spend on unnecessary tests, drugs, and procedures.

We want to make sure that we incentivize the health care system to be designed to provide you the best quality health care possible.

People are being incentivized for the wrong things. We've heard about a lot - doctors for procedures rather than creating wellness or maintaining wellness.

Under Medicare right now, I get paid to put a pacemaker in you, but I don't get paid to counsel you about end-of-life care.

We've been paying for 100 percent of preventive care. But if you're not getting annual physicals, then you're not going to gain a financial incentive, so effectively your insurance premium with us will go up.

To ensure that America remains the leader in medical innovation, we must reduce the costs of developing life-saving drugs and ensure that there are appropriate economic incentives in place to produce them.

Insurance companies pay big bucks for procedures but next to nothing for patient consultations and preventive medicine, which is what most medicine is.

Doctors and hospitals should be paid for keeping their patients well. Paying them for doing more tests and surgeries creates bad incentives.

Hospitals should be paid to keep patients out of the hospital, not for signing up more and more patients.

I don't think the people today who start hearing voices, stop eating and sleeping, and run amuck are likely to get good treatment. Having more knowledge, better diagnostic capabilities, better medications with fewer side effects, can't make up for the fact that most patients are being treated by doctors, therapists, and hospitals, who are operating under constraints and incentives that reward non-treatment, non-hospitalization, non-therapy, non-follow-up, non-care. Lost to follow-up is the best outcome a health insurer can hope for.

As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.

Meaningful health reform needs to provide incentives for physicians and other health professionals to teach their patients healthy ways of living rather than reimbursing primarily drugs and surgical interventions.

There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.

Pay-for-procedure or fee-for-service reimbursement rewards doctors and hospitals for volume - not keeping patients healthy or being efficiency. Pay-for-Performance is clearly one tool that can change the incentives to reward quality.

We now have 30 percent, for example, of Medicare patients who are seeing doctors who are rewarded for doing this kind of work, like high blood pressure control. So, the Affordable Care Act has pushed this direction down the road.