As a health policy adviser to President Obama, Ezekiel Emanuel helped to craft what would become the Affordable Care Act. He joins us to talk about ways to deliver higher quality healthcare at a lower cost, the subject of his new book, “Prescription for the Future: The Twelve Transformational Practices of Highly Effective Medical Organizations” (Public Affairs).
Ezekiel Emanuel on …
… why need to get rid of the “fee for service” in our healthcare system:
“We pay when we see the doctor, when we go into the hospital or when we get a test. That creates the incentive of doing more even when even when it’s not necessary, more even when it’s being delivered inefficiently, even more especially when the price is high and the doctor is collecting a high price for whatever he or she is delivering. … There’s a lot of good data that the United States is quote-on-quote wasting something like six, seven, $800 hundred billion a year on healthcare. A lot on uneccesary care, a lot on inefficiently delivered care, a lot on wasted administrative costs. Prices that are very, very high compared to the rest of the world. So we’re pretty sure that fee for services system is not doing us any favors.”
