Peter A. Wadsworth (LinkedIn 12/11/2020)
The Better Care Plan is a national health strategy to improve the affordability of health coverage and the quality of care received by Americans. It was developed by these eight senior healthcare executives, economists, and health policy researchers.
Conclusions
Medicare Advantage plans currently outperform Medicare fee-for-service (Parts A, B and D), and there is reason to believe that the performance gap will widen in the future as we enter “a golden age of healthcare” due to several trends:
- Growing integration of providers into coordinated care teams or integrated delivery systems.
- Growing use of pre-paid, risk adjusted and other value-based provider reimbursement.
- Growing use of IT solutions to integrate and coordinate care, measure results in real time and provide patient-specific services that have traditionally been available only on a limited basis.
There is ample evidence that offering plans similar to Medicare Advantage to Americans under age 65 will accelerate the adoption of these trends while reducing the per capita cost of care and improving health outcomes. While the Biden-Harris plan, if fully implemented, will likely address the problem of universal coverage, both public and private sectors will continue to experience growing healthcare expenditures. Only when the healthcare providers are paid to keep people well rather than providing more healthcare services will this paradigm change. The Better Care Plan is perhaps our best opportunity to begin to effect that paradigm shift.