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I agree with what you write, but I'm also spitballing stopgap measures: Are there downsides to having governments instead contract healthcare capacity? Has this
by gspr 6y ago
I agree with what you write, but I'm also spitballing stopgap measures: Are there downsides to having governments instead contract healthcare capacity? Has this been tried?
By this I mean that instead of the government paying each hospital (or in this case dentist) for each procedure, the government pays each hospital (or dentist) to keep a certain capacity for each kind of procedure available. The hospitals are obliged to provide up to that capacity at no extra cost to the government. Any demand beyond it, goes into the backlog (and turns into a political issue).
Surely I'm missing some downsides…
- Tarq0n 6y agoWe do this where I work (municipal social work and housing with care) and it really does remove some of the incentives to up-code and over-produce on the part of the provider in the short term. In the long term there's still some incentive to take on extra clients for the care providers so they have a better negotiating position for their next contact.
- kcolford 6y agoI think you might run into the issue of whether or not that capacity is actually being provided or just reported. You can definitely track that a procedure was done: you have the patient that you can contact to verify, bills for the materials that were needed, and bookings that guarantee no one was operating on multiple patients at once. If you just pay for capacity regardless of whether or not it's used, how do you know that they aren't just turning half of all patients away at the door and claiming that they provide the full capacity? There's political unrest about not enough capacity but your healthcare providers are saying no one's coming in and still taking the full amount of money.