Reducing medical costs
N.Y. Attorney General Objects to Insurer’s Ranking of Doctors by Cost and Quality - New York Times
In a sharply worded letter, the New York State attorney general’s office asked a health insurance company yesterday to halt its planned introduction of a method for ranking doctors by quality of care and cost of service, warning of legal action if it did not comply.
So do those oppose have a better plan for providing the consumer with quality indicators? Let me guess, they do think it’s possible to come up with some sort of system that will take into account all of nuances of quality relative to cost. In other words, we should just trust them to police themselves, they’ll weed out the bad apples.
The doctors didn’t seem to mind it when the insurance companies were campaigning on their behalf for caps on malpractice claims with tort reform. And everybody is so excited that we have a flood of doctors waiting to move back to Texas to practice because the cost of their doing business has decreased under the new rules. But they draw the line at insurance companies trying to reduce costs further by evaluating physician effectiveness.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of health insurance companies. But I’ve been around the medical profession in various capacities too long not to know self-serving whining when I see it. How many of these doctors voted for Republicans who support health savings account that will encourage the consumer to shop around for the best deal? But according to them, the consumer wouldn’t know what the best deal is. How convenient.
Technorati Tags: Ranking Doctors, New York State Attorney General, UnitedHealthcare, American Medical Association, Andrew Cuomo
Filed under: American Medical Association, Andrew Cuomo, New York State Attorney General, Ranking Doctors, UnitedHealthcare
They have a website called rateyourteacher.com.
Maybe we should start rateyourdoctor.com? What a cool idea.
This is all a scam by United. All they are doing is using a cheap computer program to try and gauge the efficiency (which really means low cost) and the quality of care that doctors are giving their patients. If United was sincere about implementing a quality and efficiency measuring program they would have to do it the good old fashioned way which is reviewing the medical records of the patients and having a peer review them. Their is no way a computer program can tell you whether or not a docotor is administering quality care to his/her patients. United does not want to do this because it is too costly and takes more time than simply having a computer spit out numbers. The true tradgedy would occur if this program goes public and a citizen with serious health problem(s) selects a healthcare provider based on this faulty data resulting in tradgedy.
The program may just be a way of identifying low cost care as opposed to quality care. And I realize that it would take going through medical records to really create meaningful quality metrics. But the basic problem is that whoever pays gets to decide and the insurance company is paying.
I think it’s a major cop-out when physicians complain that insurance companies are denying care to their patients. No one is preventing the doctors from delivering needed care to the patients, they just might not get paid to do it. So you mean they might not provide care if it’s not in their financial interest to do so? Isn’t that what the insurance company is doing?
Until physicians start to contribute to solving the health care problem rather than simply protecting their own self interest, it’s hard for me to feel sorry for them.
Tech Digger
Married to a health care professional, sibling of a health care professional, in-law of medical malpractice lawyer and another health care professional, data analyst for a major health care system, and new recipient of health care benefits that requires me to purchase health care out a health care savings account. Show me where the doctors have given me any information other than cost on which to base my decision.