At Better Medicine, Negoba points out how doctors contribute to the high cost of health care. Even though some doctors make high salaries (some specialists making extremely high salaries), the salaries are not the biggest part of the problem.
A doctor can be just as valuable as a controller of loss as a source of profit. In either case, the amount of money flow a doctor controls is easily 5-10 times the amount he or she makes in salary. Many larger systems with interests both at the office and hospital level will take losses on salary to retain a physician whose orders then net a profit in orders.
One of the many benefits of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a series of grants and incentives created to have medical records made into electronic data. A single source of records available to all treating or healthcare persons regarding patients allows for more effective and more efficient patient care and a reduction in unecessary or duplicative testing.
The ACA has coupled with it an HHS intiative to move away from traditional “fee for service” care to “quality of care” service with payments bundled into packets for patient care instead of itemized by service(s) provided. Additional program incentives provide for non-payment to providers when patients are re-admitted too soon after delivery of services to cut down on incentives for shoddy or incomplete care.
What with a recent study showing that some 50,000 Americans die yearly from infections or conditions acquired during their hospital stays, the ACA and HHS changes from fee for service to quality of service will save hundreds of thousands of American lives and tens or hundreds of billions in expeditures for unecessary or careless provision of health care services.
CBO cannot “score” the costs of lives saved from the ACA, hopefully voters will.