The New America Foundation's Health CEO for Health Reform produced and widely publicized last week a white paper on payment reform written by some very prominent health sector CEOs, as well as by Len Nichols, Ph.D., New America Foundation health economist, who incidentally spoke at ACC.09 in Orlando and at ACC’s 2009 Health System Reform Summit. Len has been one of the most central and respected policy leaders in how payment reform might best proceed. He and a power-packed group of health system CEOs have prophesied that fee-for-service payment must and will die within the next decade, albeit on a painfully gradual basis.

However, the authors believe new alternative payment reforms will be much fairer and less hassling to physicians, and will eliminate the administrative absurdities and costs of the current fee-for-service system, putting physicians back more in the leadership of directing patient care and aligning incentives around quality and effectiveness.

While any change of this magnitude will be scary to those of us whetted to fear of change (clinging to a failing status quo), I’m not so sure this kind of real reform is going to happen for most doctors. The current model is certainly going to kill us, and no amount of tweaking will save it. But change comes painfully slow.  

*** Image from Flickr (pot noodle). ***

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