Every American deserves high-quality, affordable health care, and yet health care is becoming unaffordable for far too many families. One driver behind the rising costs is the surge in physician practice acquisitions by private equity firms. The increased private equity purchases are driving up health care costs for Americans. By 2018 private equity represented 45% of all health care…
COVID-19 offers a “unique opportunity” to build healthcare systems that are both agile enough to deal with future crises and strong enough to overcome existing challenges. That’s according to a new policy paper from the European Alliance for Value in Health. Health Systems after COVID-19: Building Resilience Through a Value-Based Approach argues that instead of…
EmblemHealth, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health insurers, released its findings today in a national survey of what Value-Based Care means to patients and consumers. The national study found that only one in four consumers are aware of the term “Value-Based Care,” and of those, only a quarter can define it accurately. These results…
COVID-19 exacted a toll on health citizens’ mental health, worsening a public health challenge that was already acute before the pandemic. It’s World Mental Health Day, an event marked by global and local stakeholders across the mental health ecosystem. On the global front, the World Health Organization (WHO) describes the universal phenomenon and burden of mental…
Health equity is increasingly a priority for providers, and insurers can be a key partner in supporting those efforts, according to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). More than half of health systems surveyed (58%) identified health equity as a top priority, up from 25% saying the same in 2019. Equity placed second to safety in the…
HHS needs to expand the list of social determinants of health that public payers can cover and hold public payers accountable to covering preventive services that can help address social determinants of health, the Bipartisan Policy Center said in a report. “The U.S. can improve population health and health outcomes by integrating social services with the…
When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have announced the 2020 results for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) participating in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) in early September, Intermountain Healthcare’s Castell Accountable Care organization was revealed to have received a quality score of 97.03 percent and to have generated $11.5 million in savings for Medicare. The…
When I was in third grade, I fell off the jungle gym and cut my chin. I was bleeding a lot, so I was rushed off to the hospital, where they gave me stitches. What was unusual was that we were in Taiwan, in a small town where nobody spoke English. When I got to…
In August, Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure and other leaders from CMS shared their priorities for the next 10 years. In particular, they called out the importance of reducing inequities in health care, striving to get all Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries in accountable care relationships, and designing financial incentives that will encourage participation in new payment and…
Chronic diseases are a leading cause of death and disability in the USA, and the number of Americans affected by chronic illnesses is estimated to hit 50% by 2025. Co-morbid diagnoses are a significant consequence of this, with one in four US adults struggling to manage two or more chronic conditions simultaneously. As a result…