Health Care Cost

A new payment model through the Affordable Care Act seeks to decrease cardiovascular disease for tens of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries by assessing patient risks for heart attack and stroke and then helping them to reduce those risks.

The suits are on behalf of providers and health insurance customers and involve some famous plaintiffs' attorneys.

The authors discuss the success of the Pioneer ACO model and the Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative, among others. They outline an agenda that includes engaging managed care stakeholders, so that both public and private payers are moving toward value-based payment.

According to Robert Pozen, non-resident senior fellow at Brookings, government healthcare plans were 17.5% higher cost than the average citizen's plan, while their employee contributions were 45% less than the average plan. If these patterns continue, many state and city healthcare plans will run up against the "Cadillac" tax in 2018, he predicts.

Medicare's new payment formula is set to begin in 2019. The problem is no one's agreed on standards for measuring quality or efficiency of patient care.

An independent review of Medicare payments reveals that 42% of the healthcare dollars Medicare paid to providers in its fee-for-service program in 2013 were designed to boost the value of care patients receive.