Amory Associates Blog

The Better Care Plan Advantage

Peter A. Wadsworth (LinkedIn 12/11/2020)

Better Care Plan logo

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.

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Medicare-for-All Part II: A Risk Assessment

Medicare-for-All Part II: A Risk assessment published on LinkedIn August 30, 2019.

There are substantial obstacles to MFA becoming law, which render MFA a high-risk proposition that could crowd out more moderate legislative proposals, include:

  1. Elimination of Private Health Insurance (Sec. 107), an industry that represents more than 6 % of our Gross Domestic Product.
  2. The Freedom of Choice (Sec. 103) provision which would most likely compromise quality and increase the cost of care.
  3. Elimination of managed care, the most proven method of controlling cost and quality of care.
  4. Eroding public support evidenced by multiple public opinion polls exploring MFA’s specifics.
  5. Legislative risk that MFA could never be enacted and build opposition to multi-payer proposals.
  6. Implementation risk: Failure to properly implement an extremely ambitious makeover of the health insurance market could lead to years of chaos.
  7. Underfunding/Rationing of Care because Congress would have complete control of the national healthcare budget.

And there is considerable evidence that a multi-payer system, common in Europe, performs better than single payer systems and is a better fit for the American market.

Medicare-for-All Part III: Assessing the Alternatives published

This article compares Medicare-for-All with several alternatives including a public option, Medicare Extra for All, the Healthy America Program (revised) and Medicare Advantage for All using six criteria, such as universality of coverage, affordability, per capita costs and implementation time-frame. It concludes with seven recommendations, most notably nationalization of Medicaid and substantial changes to the way healthcare is organized and reimbursed.  Published at LinkedIn

See also
Medicare-for-All Part II: A Risk assessment &
Medicare-for-All Part I: Financial Analysis

Top 10 (lowest) Hospital Death Scores

Three California and two New York and two Illinois hospitals are among the top 10 U.S. hospitals with the lowest (best) Hospital Outcomes Death Scores. Other states represented include Texas, Michigan and Ohio. Hospital Outcomes Scores (HOS) have been developed by Amory Associates based on data submitted to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) by over 4,000 hospitals.  For details, click the link below.

Top 10 Hospital Death Scores