3 Pros and Cons of Healthcare Reform:
Pros
1. Becoming more efficient: Healthcare reform and all its
provisions are already making hospitals find new ways to increase facility
efficiency, better manage care and streamline costs. One item is renovating
hospitals to cut down on operating expenses. Hospital executives allocated 21%
of their budget to renovations compared to 16% for new construction in 2012
according to an ASHE 2012 survey. Another method is implementing new programs
such as Seton Family of Hospitals did when they enacted a nurse call center
which on a monthly average dropped emergency room trips by 12.1%.
2. New model of care: Hospitals are moving away from the
contemporary fee-for-service model, a contributing factor for our excessive
healthcare spending, and are switching to value based models of care. Before,
the more services hospitals performed, the more money they would make. Now,
that is changing with hospitals being held accountable for their patients.
Patient treatment outcomes versus cost are compared and hospitals who meet the
requirements receive a bump in federal payments.
3. Helps the bottom line: Though there will be substantial cuts
to Medicare, should healthcare reform pass, the vast majority of uninsured
costs would be covered, giving some money back for what was previously written
off. This suggests more money will be available to healthcare providers and, if
the theory holds, a healthier population that needs less care over time. Alhough,
it also depends on the specific hospital’s surrounding community and amount of
care performed for indigent patients compared to Medicare patients.
Cons
1. Administrative costs: Hospitals and health systems will have
more to do on their own as they take care of the influx of new patients. That
is much more paper work, disease and care management, over-seeing and time
dealing with Medicare for the millions of newly insured patients.
2. Coverage: The sheer act of providing coverage to more people
would produce a new order of challenges. If access can’t be improved then there
is still a problem of providing care. Medicare and Medicaid patients already
indicate it difficult to find a physician, and coupled with the high attrition
rate of doctors, finding healthcare providers to treat these new patients will
be in increasingly short supply.
3. Cut in payments: Yes, there will be excessive decreases to
Medicare reimbursements, around $112 billion in the ensuing years according to
the Congressional Budge Office. There will also be a loss in tax breaks. These
are viable methods the government issues to help hospitals meet their costs.
Source: healthcarefinancenews
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