Confusion characterizes much of the public discourse about health care reform and nowhere is this more evident than in the area of consumer-driven health care. A case in point is this post on the Concurring Opinions weblog, in which Frank Pasquale confuses the CDHC issue with the specialty hospital controversy:
Some aspects of CDHC have a lot to offer the “healthy, wealthy, and wise.” But there are some darker trends … Consider, for instance, the rise of specialty hospitals–those that only focus on a particular type of medical problem.
The issue of specialty hospitals is, at best, only tangentially related to CDHC. In fact, the rise of such hospitals is more a function of “physician-driven” health care than of CDHC. It isn’t the patients who decide to forego the local community hospital for the doctor-owned alternative. It is, instead, the physician-owners themselves who simply steer the best-insured patients in that direction.
I have my own reservations about the viability of CDHC, but they are based on the real issues surrounding that phenomenon: primarily the difficulty of making accurate comparisons between providers (see Schwitzer) and the near impossibility of decoding the Byzantine cost and reimbursement structure of the health care system in general. Specialty hospitals are another can of worms altogether
Post a Comment