The Health Care Transformation Task Force issued a strong letter to President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect Pence, and Congressional leadership supporting the continuation of public and private efforts to replace fee-for-service payments for healthcare services with value-based alternatives. Remedy Partners is one of the Task Force’s 43 member organizations (both for-profit and not-for-profit) which include six of the nation’s top 15 health systems and four of the top 25 health insurers, as well as leading national organizations representing employers, patients and their families, and the policy community.
The letter stated that, “This is not the time for policymakers to waver or reverse course, which would send a negative message to the industry and chill ongoing transformation efforts.”
The transition to value-based payments, the letter says, falls squarely within bipartisan efforts to contain healthcare costs, which generally exceed general inflation. “No other single policy initiative holds more promise to moderate entitlement spending and to free up needed discretionary resources for other national priorities, like infrastructure and defense,” said Jeff Micklos, executive director of the Task Force.
David Lansky, Task Force vice chair and president and CEO of the Pacific Business Group on Health said that high healthcare costs are “reducing the competitiveness of U.S. businesses and the wages of its workers without producing better health.”
The solution is shifting payment to reward high value care, which, Lansky says, “will encourage innovation, coordination, and more efficient use of expensive resources, while creating accountability for improving patients’ health.”
Lansky add that even while they are not fully scaled “the new payment models have made great progress in promoting transparency, reducing cost, and improving quality. Many organizations are nearing the tipping point for realizing permanent change. In recent years, the moderation of the rate of Medicare spending increases reflects that the transformation investments are producing a desirable return.”
Members of the task force say they are committed to “transitioning 75% of their business to value-based payment models by 2020.” By the end of 2015, they had shifted more than 40% of payments to value-based models.