Yeah. If your hypothesis is that it might be lower when the payer and provider are effectively the same entity you could also look closely at the VA or Kaiser i

Yeah. If your hypothesis is that it might be lower when the payer and provider are effectively the same entity you could also look closely at the VA or Kaiser in the US for comparison. Both have historically had reputations in the past for doing better-than-average with regard to patient safety but I'm not sure whether there are apples-to-apples numbers that bear that out. In one sense you'd think having responsibility for both sides of the equation would drive quality up by attaching responsibility for care with responsibility for cost... but in another sense it the lack of tension from going from two-actors to one can make things worse. To fix a problem like this you've got to surface it first, and surfacing it leads to lots of legal exposure while you figure out how to fix it. See the VA scandal of the past year or two for instance. It seems unlikely those kinds of lapses in care would have been as prevalent if an outside party was taking on risk and picking up the bill for services rendered (or the consequences of not rendering them, in this case)... That's just me speculating though.