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We've all heard the old adage you can't manage what you don't measure. The same is true for health care. In Colorado and across the nation, costs for health care services continue spiraling out of control, gobbling up higher percentages of our wages while taking away from resources that could improve our schools and infrastructure.

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As the CEO of an organization deeply focused on efforts to make Colorado’s health care better and less expensive, I get a lot of questions about the Affordable Care Act (ACA, Federal Health Care Reform, aka Obamacare). Many assume that if the Supreme Court strikes the law down, the work of CIVHC and many other partner organizations somehow goes away and we hit a big re-set button for our work.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

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People often wonder why health care costs so much. Surprisingly, the answer may lie not just in the price of medical care, but also in the way we pay for it.

Our current "system" rewards inefficient, high-cost medicine and penalizes efficient, low-cost health care. Because patients and insurance companies pay for each visit, procedure, prescription and lab test separately, there are built-in incentives for more care without regard to whether it is the right care or is making a difference in patients' health. As a result of the current health care payment structure, many experts believe that 20 to 30 percent of care provided does not add value – or even potentially harms the patient.

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As a patient, would you like to know how much a medical procedure will cost you before you get it? As a buyer of insurance, would you like to know how the providers in one health plan’s network compare on cost and quality measures with those in another? As a Colorado taxpayer, would you like to know how new initiatives from Medicaid, the Child Health Plan Plus and public health departments are affecting health outcomes and costs?

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This week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released an analysis of 10 Medicare demonstration projects undertaken over the last 20 years. All were designed to save the program money, but only one succeeded in doing so. Do these findings mean we should abandon efforts to redesign our country’s health care payment and delivery systems?

Not at all. In fact, when you look below the surface of the CBO report, you reach precisely the opposite conclusion. The reason most of these pilots did not achieve their desired goals is because they were built upon our existing fragmented delivery and fee-for-service/pay-for-piecework system—a system that incents more, not better care, pays a second time for avoidable complications and provides no and incentive for care coordination and better outcomes.

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