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Full-Text Articles in Health Policy
Financial Rewards Tied To Quality Measures Lead Home Health Agencies To Exaggerate Their Improvements, Jun Li, Meher Chahal
Financial Rewards Tied To Quality Measures Lead Home Health Agencies To Exaggerate Their Improvements, Jun Li, Meher Chahal
Population Health Research Brief Series
More than 4 million people in the United States use home health care each year, but the quality varies and is often poor. In 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) began rewarding and penalizing home health agencies for their performance on a set of predetermined quality measures in an experiment called the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) program. This brief summarizes the results of a recent study evaluating the program’s impact on quality measures within the HHVBP and whether there was a relationship between incentive size and apparent quality. Findings suggest that while financial rewards improved the …
The U.S. Should Expand Access To Dental Care For Older Adults, Madonna Harrington Meyer, Sarah Reilly, Julia Finan
The U.S. Should Expand Access To Dental Care For Older Adults, Madonna Harrington Meyer, Sarah Reilly, Julia Finan
Population Health Research Brief Series
Older adult Medicare recipients face high out-of-pocket dental expenses due to a lack of appropriate dental care coverage. Older adults with lower socioeconomic status tend to have worse oral health, less dental insurance coverage, greater difficulties finding a dentist, and low-quality care. This brief details the experiences socioeconomically disadvantaged older adults face in obtaining appropriate and affordable dental care and calls on Congress to include preventative and restorative dental care as part of the federal funding agenda.
Changing Economic Incentives In Long-Term Care, R. Tamara Konetzka
Changing Economic Incentives In Long-Term Care, R. Tamara Konetzka
Center for Policy Research
Just as managed care has changed utilization and incentives in other parts of health care, there is a whole set of incentives built around long-term care that really matter. For example, if nursing homes have a financial incentive to hospitalize people with certain health conditions, then in the long run they are not going to develop the programs and invest in the resources to treat those people in the facility. Instead they're going to use those resources to stay in business or to provide other types of care. And while we can assume that policymakers do not create regulations that …
Variations Among Regions And Hospitals In Managing Chronic Illness: How Much Care Is Enough?, John E. Wennberg
Variations Among Regions And Hospitals In Managing Chronic Illness: How Much Care Is Enough?, John E. Wennberg
Center for Policy Research
Classic epidemiology looks at what happens to people who live in a defined region over time. For example, birth rate, the number of births that occur among populations over a year, is a common statistics that we're all familiar with. Since the early 1990s we have conducted research at Dartmouth Medical School to convert that classic epidemiologic perspective into looking at what is happening in terms of the health care system itself. We ask how much care people are getting in different regions of the country. We want to know the patterns of that care. And we want to get …
Patients As Consumers: Making The Health Care System Our Own., David J. Lansky
Patients As Consumers: Making The Health Care System Our Own., David J. Lansky
Center for Policy Research
I ask you to think about our health care system. Think beyond the issues that are in front of us today: the anxiety we have about managed care, obtaining our own health care and paying for it, the survival of Medicare, and the unpredictable impact of government regulations. Think about our *health*, what we want from our health care system, what we're spending all this money for, and what we care about for ourselves and for our families. The challenge we face in the next five, ten, or fifteen years is to place the American health care system under the …
New Conundrums: Public Policy And The Emerging Health Care Marketplace, James R. Tallon
New Conundrums: Public Policy And The Emerging Health Care Marketplace, James R. Tallon
Center for Policy Research
There is a fundamentally new dynamic in American health care, one that has yet to be fully experienced but that threatens to leave a large portion of the American population without access to the quality health care they have received in the past. While the federal government has not completely abandoned the goal of assuring universal health care, a goal that dates back to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s and even earlier, the mechanisms to pursue that goal have changed. The implicit contract between government and health care providers--mostly doctors and not-for-profit hospitals--under which subsidized care …