Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care invites you to a webinar featuring Dr. Ana Malinow who will present on:
Value-Based or Value-Less? From the Board Room to the Exam Room:
Medicare, Privatization, and the Menace of “Value-Based” Care.
Following the presentation, Dr. Malinow will respond to our questions. You’re invited! If you would like to participate, please email Kay at nursenpo@aol.com requesting to be sent the zoom link for the Dec. 7 webinar.
Dr. Ana Malinow spent three decades working as a pediatrician with immigrant, refugee and underserved children in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, and California before retiring as Clinical Professor of Pediatrics from the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. She is past president of Physicians for a National Health Program and has been featured on national and international television and radio on health care reform and the stealth privatization of traditional Medicare. She is currently a lead organizer for National Single Payer and The Movement to End Privatization of Medicare.
(This webinar will replace the December first Thursday meeting of KSPH. If you are on that list to receive the zoom link for regular meetings, you will receive the link for the webinar automatically.)
1. Value-based payment has produced little value. It needs a time-out
By Kip Sullivan, Ana Malinow and Kay Tillow, July 26, 2022
The value-based payment crusade is now two decades old. But despite the tens of billions of dollars — perhaps hundreds of billions — spent on these programs, they have done little to improve Americans’ health or lower health care costs. It is time for proponents of value-based care to call a halt to these programs until they have an answer to this question: “Why have the vast majority of value-based payment experiments failed to improve value?”
Advocates of value-based care are not about to do that. Although some of the leading lights of the movement are willing to admit they have little to show for all the money and time sunk into accountable care organizations and kindred value-based entities, none has been willing to call for an end to continued experimentation with schemes that have clearly failed.
The concept of value-based payment became widespread among U.S. health policymakers and analysts during the 2000s. It collectively refers to interventions that offer doctors and hospitals financial incentives that, in theory, induce them to improve both components of health-care value — cost and quality — without generating the hostility provoked by managed care insurance companies during the HMO backlash of the late 1990s.
Full article: https://www.statnews.com/2022/07/26/value-based-payment-produced-little-value/
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2. Value-Based Payment Is the New For-Profit Health Care Industry
Financed by powerful corporations and private equity firms, value-based payment threatens to take over health care.
By Kip Sullivan , Kay Tillow , Ana Malinow , Truthout, Published September 8, 2022
Over the last decade, a new industry has emerged that may eventually contribute as much to administrative waste as the insurance industry does today. This industry has no name. Because the participants in the industry all promote a new scheme known as “value-based payment,” and because they all make money off it, we propose to call the new industry the value-based payment (VBP) industry.
Like the insurance industry, the VBP industry hovers over doctors and patients and seeks to influence (and in some cases, dictate) doctor-patient decision-making, and in the process diverts resources away from medical care. Unlike the insurance industry, the VBP industry is almost invisible to the public. It consists of a heterogeneous mix of corporations that own, contract with, manage, consult with, or sell services to providers (doctors and hospitals). Some, such as “accountable care organizations,” mimic insurance companies. Others are consultants, such as Privia, venture capitalists like General Catalyst, or firms selling management services, such as agilon health. Large pieces of this new industry are being bought out by companies like Walgreens and Amazon.
The economic and political power of this new industry was on display at the National Primary Care Transformation Summit, a virtual five-day event held in late July.
Full article on Truthout:
https://truthout.org/articles/value-based-payment-is-the-new-for-profit-health-care-industry/
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3.“Value-Based Care” is a Pretext for Privatization
by Kay Tillow, July 13, 2022
Later this month, right before Medicare’s 57th birthday on July 30, corporate health care and the government players who facilitate their lucrative businesses, will gather for a summit on value-based care. They will speak of driving health equity, of reaching underserved communities, of coordination of care, and accountable care. They will insist that physicians share in risk just like insurance companies. They will advocate the transformation of health care to value-based care, supposedly founded on payment for quality rather than quantity, value instead of volume, and outcomes not fee-for-service. They will assert that this transformation brings equity, improves care, and saves money.
They have no evidence to back up their assertions. But the scheme to move to value-based care and to shove risk onto physicians imposes profit-making managers into the system, shifts the profit incentive from more care to denial of treatment, and expands opportunities for venture capital, private equity, and insurance companies. This up-coming corporate-sponsored extravaganza will concentrate on promoting value-based care as the bipartisan solution to our failed yet costly health care system that has thrown 100 million into medical debt as the nation suffered 338,000 deaths from Covid that would not have happened had we had a universal health care system. Life expectancy is plummeting as the profits climb.
Article on Counterpunch:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/13/value-based-care-is-a-pretext-for-privatization/