Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Is health reform coming to the UK? Since the middle of the decade, the NHS has used a tariff system which pays a fixed price per procedure. Now, however, the Financial Times, reports that the UK plans for “public and private hospitals to compete on price for the treatment of NHS patients.” The reform calls…
The cost of running a hospital in New York City is much higher than running a hospital in Bozeman, Montana. To take into account these cost differences, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has created a wage index to adjust the inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS) for differences in labor costs. However, the…
A paper by Sutton, Elder Guthrie and Watt (2010) describes the UK’s National Health Service’s (NHS) adoption of the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) in April 2004. In general, P4P programs can have positive or negative spillovers. An example of a positive spillover would be the adoption of EMR to comply with certain P4P initiatives,…
Pay-for-performance is a hot topic in the health policy world. However, one of the largest pay-for-performance programs has already been implemented in the UK’s National Health Service. A paper by Doran et al. (2006) reviews the overall implementation of the NHS’s P4P program as well as how some physicians used exceptions to greatly increase their…
In the 1990s, the UK’s National Health Service may have imitated most American’s idea of what is wrong with a single payer system. However, when Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997 government spending on the NHS increased. Over the past decade spending on the health service has risen by over 6% a year in…