The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is striving to build a Culture of Health in this country where everyone has an equal opportunity to live the healthiest life possible, no matter where they live, learn, work, and play. To get there, we need to make sure that everyone is getting the high quality, affordable care they want and need whether this care is provided inside or outside the health care system. Right now in the U.S., we spend a lot of money on health care, especially as compared to other countries, but we don’t have the outcomes to show for it. Last year, Congress passed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 that would change how Medicare pays physicians with the goal of getting higher value for our health care dollars. And recently, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed rules for how these payment and reporting requirements would be implemented.
On June 23, 2016, RWJF submitted comments on these proposed rules. We believe that changing health care payment in this country to reward better, rather than more care, is critically important. In our comments, we shared lessons and insights from RWJF grantees to encourage CMS to design incentives in ways that will truly transform our health care system to provide measurably better outcomes for all. We focused our comments on three areas: fostering integrated care, ensuring patient goals and needs are at the center of all we do, and providing high value care for everyone.
