Checkup: Reducing Costs By Paying More

You've all been there. Sitting in a sterile waiting room while you fidget. Finally hearing your name called, allowing you a few precious moments with the man in the white coat. While you are waiting, time seems to drag, but once ushered into the presence of a physician it suddenly seems to kick into overdrive. You can hardly believe that you were in and out so quickly.

It begs the question: can adequate care really be given in the rushed format in which most doctors see their patients?

One answer offered also claims to be a route towards decreasing medical spending. In short, the idea of paying doctors more to take time with their patients (a permutation of the Medical Home concept) to prevent massive costs down the line. It is a grand experiment on the part of a group of state and federal government agencies in conjunction with a number of insurers.

Milt Feudenheim at The New York Times gives us two pages of analysis and commentary on the idea. Here is an illustration of the difference taken from that article:

For want of a careful examination by a primary-care doctor, Mr. Williamson became one of countless Americans each year whose unidentified or under-treated illnesses escalate into medical conditions with catastrophic personal and economic costs. Besides incurring $30,000 in hospital bills paid by his employer’s insurer, Mr. Williamson had to stop working as a customer service representative at Philadelphia Gas Works and go on Social Security disability, at a current cost to taxpayers of $1,900 a month.

With Mr. Williamson’s new doctor, such an outcome would be much less likely.

“I give him my heart and diabetes readings by e-mail and phone, without getting up out of my chair,” Mr. Williamson said. “I can get better directions, at the very moment I need them. It’s life-saving.”

His current internist, Richard Baron, is one of more than 100 physicians in metropolitan Philadelphia taking part in the experiment, which is being conducted jointly by some of the region’s largest insurers. Dr. Baron still gets a fee of only about $64 for each office visit. But his five-doctor group will also receive $200,000 to $300,000 this year beyond their regular fees to keep better track of their 8,400 patients.

“We are trying to do more e-mail care and telephone care, which we haven’t been paid for in the past,” Dr. Baron said.

Insurers are conducting similar pilot projects in at least a half-dozen states, in experiments involving thousands of doctors and nearly 2 million patients. Many more are in the planning stages, at the urging of health policy experts and employers that provide medical benefits.

The big government health care programs, Medicaid and Medicare, are also studying the concept. A Medicaid experiment already under way in North Carolina saved the government program in that state about $162 million in 2006. That was 11 percent less than the state would have spent under the old system of reimbursement, according to an audit by Mercer, a consulting firm.

This looks like an idea that might have legs. It is axiomatic that more careful and comprehensive care should drastically reduce the longterm costs of health care. Whether this approach will yield a solution or not is something only time will tell, but the logic is sound.

Certainly a set of initiatives to watch!

SOURCE: "Trying to Save by Increasing Doctors' Fees" 07/21/08
photo courtesy of Papalar, used under its Creative Commons license