US Considering Comparison of Health Care Cost Regulation To Other Countries
The Health Care system is very important to a country so its citizens could avail of medication for any condition they might need. In a Rutgers University study, researchers found out that standardized fees and negotiations between insurers and providers can improve the United States' health care affordability.
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According to the Department for Professional Employees, the U.S health care system is unique among industrialized countries because it has no uniform health system, has no universal health care coverage. They added that legislation mandating healthcare coverage for everyone was only recently enacted. In the release by Rutgers University, the study examined how other High-income countries such as Germany, Japan, and France, utilize a fee-for-service model to regulate health care costs.
The release further that although the United States has the highest health care prices among counties with the same system, the mechanisms specifically used by other countries in setting and updating prices are often overlooked. The release that most countries with universal healthcare insurance, physicians or doctors are paid on a fee-for-service basis even though health care prices in the countries used as a comparison is much lower than in the US.
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Methods of The Study
The release by Rutgers University said that researchers compared policies from France, Japan, and Germany where payers and physicians are involved in structured fee negotiations and standardized prices in systems that fee-for-service is the main model of outpatient physician reimbursement.
The release added that 37 stakeholders and health policy experts were interviewed for them to fully understand the process for establishing physician fee schedules and updates, learning the physician payment's recent policy changes, and the obstacles in using fee-for-service payments to the physicians.
In a statement mentioned in the release, the lead author of the study and professor from Rutgers School of Public Health, and research scholar at The Hastings Center, Michael Gusmano said that the parties involved in the frequency of fee schedule updates and the scope of the negotiations vary. However, he also stressed that all three countries attempt to balance the interest of payers with those of physician associations.
According to the study, all residents in Japan, Germany, France, are covered by universal insurance by multiple insurers, which works within a national standard pricing framework for the healthcare provider fees. The study also added that social insurance's contributions are based on the subscriber's income which makes them rely on private sector providers. The study also notes that competition happens between health care providers and not the insurers.
The release stresses that when utilizing the fee-for-service physician payment creates issues, but marking fee-for-service as the main cause of the high healthcare spending in the US is challenging, most especially when countries with lower prices and expenses use fee-for-service systems simultaneously providing healthcare universally to its citizens. In limiting the volume of service provided, the researchers said in the release that Japan, Germany, and France limit the income of physicians through standardized and adjusted fees for their pay.
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Nov 23, 2020 08:00 PM EST
