Healthcare reform is a political and social minefield. Linear cause-and-effect logic (let us do reform X, then realize benefit Y) rarely holds, and the complex, high-tech/high-touch nature of healthcare systems adds further challenges. Nevertheless, any major societal reform must prove its worth.
To that end, it is essential to systematically assess the impact of reforms and improvements over time, using a control group of people who do not receive them. This may not depoliticize healthcare reforms entirely, but it can put them on a much more solid footing.
Free Prevention Benefits: Insurers are required to cover recommended preventive services without charging extra, such as copays or deductibles, helping 137 million Americans with private insurance coverage whose benefits were previously limited. Young Adult Coverage: Most young adults can now stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, giving them more choices for family health coverage and financial security.
Health System Improvement: A unified information and reimbursement system would enable market-based reforms to drive performance and public policies to be continually evaluated and refined. It could also eliminate the violence done to physicians’ professional values under a system that currently forces them to discriminate on the basis of ability to pay and to evade costs. It would also establish fully risk-adjusted global payments to physician-led, comprehensive care organizations, with accountability for longitudinal patient outcomes and a uniform fee schedule, as well as a transition to value-based contracts in specialist and facility-based care.