Policy makers who are responsible for shaping how the federal government (the country’s biggest payer of health care services) pays physicians are pushing CMS on a rapid path away from traditional fee-for-service (FFS). As I discussed last year, CMS intends to have 50 percent of its payments flow through “alternative payment models” such as ACOs and bundled payments by 2018, with nearly all of the rest of the FFS payments linked to quality measures.
While I believe this is generally a good thing, I pointed out recently that changing how the dollars flow is not the same as changing how the care gets delivered. Changing payment models facilitates redesigning care, but it doesn’t automatically create new care models. That only happens when physicians, liberated from the constraints of FFS, lead the way to do the right things for patient.
Given the centrality of physicians to care redesign, and the importance of payment reform to physicians, I was more than a little surprised to read recently just how dominant FFS remains in the world of physician payments.
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