Can the Government Make Doctors Better Doctors?
May 10, 2016
News Article
You can take this to the bank. Every innovation in the production of every good or service—anything that lowers costs or increases quality—originates on the supply side of the market.
This principle applies to health care in spades. For as long as I have been in health policy—more than 30 years—I have been dealing with non-doctors who have a deep, abiding desire to tell doctors what to do. Yet I don’t know of any example anywhere in the world where this approach has ever worked.
If the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and each time expecting a different result then “insanity” is the appropriate word here. The Obama administration has spent millions of dollars on pilot programs and demonstration projects in a fruitless attempt to discover how to better practice medicine. It has spent millions more trying to herd Medicare patients into Accountable Care Organizations—super HMOs with financial incentives to hit quality measures. That hasn’t worked either.
So what does the Obama Administration propose to do about all of this? More of the same.
