Revamping the structure of how health care is provided and paid for is a crucial health care reform for which there is broad support, the head of the state’s major lobbying and advocacy group for hospitals said today.
“Hospitals and doctors have got to start working together again,” Craig Becker, president of the Tennessee Hospital Association, said at the Rotary Club of Chattanooga’s meeting at the Chattanooga Convention Center.
Hospitals must work with physicians to direct care for patients and should be compensated in a way that rewards such coordination, rather than rewarding more treatments, he said.
“Fee-for-service is one of the most perverse incentives out there. It’s volume driven and it is definitely not the way we want to be in the future,” he said.
The Rolling Hills Group, a Tennessee-based group of health care executives, providers, insurers and experts, came up with a health reform plan that would have required 10 years to phase in, Mr. Becker said.
The three- to four-year phase in of major reforms preferred by the congressional bills would have been “way too much of a shock,” he said.
Health care reporter Emily Bregel has worked at the Chattanooga Times Free Press since July 2006. She previously covered banking and wrote for the Life section. Emily, a native of Baltimore, Md., earned a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Columbia University. She received a first-place award for feature writing from the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists’ Golden Press Card Contest for a 2009 article about a boy with a congenital heart defect. She ...
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