Fee-for-service: A barrier to health reform

A reason why “Medicare for all” will fail:

As many people now understand, fee-for-service medicine pays doctors more for treating illnesses and injuries than it does for preventing them – or even for diagnosing them early and reducing the need for intensive treatment later.

That’s one of the reasons why I haven’t embraced “Medicare for all” as a meaningful model for healthcare reform. Most Medicare is provided on a fee-for-service basis, and our country has created a class of high-earning doctors under that system. Medicare attempts to control utilization as well as cost, but putting the entire population into the current Medicare system without addressing the fee-for-service issue could have unintended consequences.

(via Joe Paduda)

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