Affordable Health Care Act, Research Paper Example

The new health policy brief from health affairs analyzes the pay-for-performance plans, and the provisions found in the Affordable Care Act, which elaborates on the financial incentives to hospitals and doctors for exceeding some performance and quality measures. The designation of the concept of pay-for-performance was to address the pitfalls of traditional fee-for-service payment that incentivizes an enormous volume of treatments in spite of patient’s outcomes. The problem of this financial health care, pay-for-performance is that its design raises questions whether the program offer incentives large enough to encourage the providers to improve or transform their behavior.

For instance, some research even says the Medicare’s Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program might change payments to about two thirds of acute care hospitals by one percent fraction. They even suggest motivating the providers to change. The other problem raising many questions concerns the result of pay-for-performance approaches on providers that serve the disadvantaged or poor societies. The program will affect them since they have the challenge of finance, and hence, will face difficulties in meeting patient needs, especially if they face the subjection of financial penalties. Therefore, the solution to these problems is to determine the consequences of the program and make changes where appropriate (Samuels, 2011, p.221).

Concerning the implementation of the New Affordable Care Act plus the mounting concern from all sides to the quality and costs of health care, program of pay-for-performance may become more of commonplace. Research and evidence shows that there is still needs to establish, for instance, the amount of rewards that will bring the desired changes. In addition, there is still need in establishing how to sustain the improvements in performance over some period. Therefore, the evaluations of the future will have to identify and show the unintended consequences and the contradictory impacts touching on various health care markets (Copeland & Carey, 2011).

References

Samuels, D. (2011). Managed Health Care in the New Millennium: Innovative Financial Modeling for the 21st Century. CRC Press

Copland, C, & Carey, M. (2011). Upcoming Rules Pursuant to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). New Jersey NJ: DIANE Publishing