Feel Better or your Money Back?

Not exactly. But if you are following Washington's "healthcare reform debate" at all you can be forgiven if the whole thing sounds more like "health insurance expansion". Proposals for, or even discussion of, actual changes to our broken healthcare delivery SYSTEM are more scarce than modesty at the Academy Awards. How about some innovation in the actual provision of medical services?

Here's an interesting idea from a PricewaterhouseCoopers study reported in the Colorado Springs Business Journal. What if instead of paying for how many different procedures a doctor ordered, we paid instead for the outcome? The RESULT of their treatment. Is it practical? Would it lower healthcare costs while maintaining or improving quality? I don't know, but it seems to me that simply adding more and more people to our unsupportably expensive system surely wont.