“Value” is the focus right now in American health care. Payers like Medicare and private insurers are placing great emphasis on it, as are hospitals and doctors’ offices needing to satisfy the demands of those payers to get paid. But the focus on value in the present system is centered on reforming payment and lowering costs almost exclusively, rather than enhancing the patient experience, and involves unproven approaches like “bundled payment” and “pay for performance”, in which doctors and hospitals are financially incented to fixate on efficiency in how they deliver care. In short, right now “value” means figuring out ways insurers can save money and providers cannot lose money.
The emphasis on value in terms of efficiency and payment reform isn’t trickling down in positive ways to individual patients. Insurance premiums continue to rise, taking more dollars out of patients’ paychecks to cover the care they need. Health insurance is covering less in that many of us pay higher deductibles and co-pays in our plans for services such as physical therapy, mental health care, and emergency care. Many people have annual deductibles of thousands of dollars that must be paid before having any specialty care covered.
Americans pay more and yet have serious access problems in primary care, long-term care, and much specialty care. Wait times to see all kinds of doctors are increasing in most areas of the country. To deal with this, in American primary care patients are guided into undifferentiated, highly transactional forms of service delivery that may be cheaper but are less comprehensive in the services offered and impersonal, involving fast-food care provided through web-based apps, big box stores, and urgent care centers. These sources of care often practice their medicine according to “cookbooks” of standardized clinical guidelines using high-turnover providers, giving us fewer moments of the relational excellence so important in high-quality health care.
