Law Commons^™

Pay-For-Performance In Prison: Using Healthcare Economics To Improve Criminal Justice, W. David Ball

Faculty Publications

For much of the last seventy-plus years, healthcare providers in the United States have been paid under the fee-for-service system, where providers are reimbursed for procedures performed, not outcomes obtained. Providers, insurers, and consumers are motivated by different individual and organizational incentives; costs and burdens of patient care are shifted from one part of the system to another. The result has been a system that combines exploding costs without concomitant increases in quality. Healthcare economists and policymakers have reacted by proposing a number of policies designed to reign in costs without sacrificing quality. One approach is to focus on the …