On September 9th, 2008 the ranking members of the Senate Finance Committee conducted a hearing entitled "Improving Health Care Quality, an Integral Step in Health Care Reform". A series of health payment industry leaders testified about the need to move forward the value based payment agenda. Senators Grassley and Bacus are continuing the ongoing discussions in Congress about how to fix the Medicare system. Senator Grassley stated "The way Medicare currently pays for health care certainly doesn’t provide incentives to improve quality. Today, the poor quality provider gets paid the same as the high quality provider. In some instances, the poor quality provider gets paid even more. In fact, the current system encourages a high volume of services instead of quality. It is just disgraceful to me that Medicare rewards poor quality care in many cases. And because many private health plans follow Medicare’s lead in how they pay providers, these flaws in Medicare spread to the entire system. "
Senator Bacus stated, "Medicare rewards healthcare providers based on the volume of services that they provide. The more patients they see, the more revenue they bring in. That’s regardless of the quality of care. Most policy experts and healthcare providers recognize that we need to shift our focus onto
quality. We need to encourage better patient outcomes. This effort would improve the health and longevity of patients. And improving patient outcomes should also help to reduce costs and rein in healthcare spending."
What is notable for the health industry from these continuing congressional hearing is that there is high level support for moving the Value Based Purchasing initiative from both parties. Regardless of who may be elected in November it is a fair bet that these discussions will go forward since no other alternatives seem to have a champion.
