Pay for Performance, or Performance for Pay?

Peter Polack — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:35:14 +0000

The new federal pay-for-performance pilot program may prove to be short-lived.On December 20, 2006, President Bush signed into law the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 (TRHCA). A broad tax reform omnibus that also included a number of key health care measures, the bill authorized the establishment of a pay-for-performance program known as the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI). According to the website of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, PQRI establishes a financial incentive of up to 1.5% of the total allowed charges for covered Medicare physician fee schedule services for eligible professionals whose performance meets a designated set of quality measures.

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Post tags: healthcare, Insurance, performance, Reimbursement

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Where Does All the Healthcare Money Go?

Peter Polack — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:12:11 +0000

Why is the cost of healthcare going up when doctors’ reimbursement keeps going down?If doctors are getting paid less and less by managed care insurance companies, why is the cost of healthcare rising exponentially in the country? Just look at the stock returns of these same insurance companies. And while physicians on average have seen about a 95% decrease in reimbursement in the last ten years, compare this to the compensation of the CEOs of these companies: $358 million for one CEO of a health insurance company.

If you add the total compensation of the top ten insurance company CEOs, this equals 1/900 of the total healthcare expenditure of the United States. In other words, 1/900 of all the money spent on healthcare in the US goes to ten people.

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Post tags: compensation, costs, healthcare, Reimbursement

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Medical Practice Trends.com » Reimbursement

Pay for Performance, or Performance for Pay?

Where Does All the Healthcare Money Go?