Rewarding Preventive Care in South Carolina  by | July 24, 2012
It's become something of a truism that the way we pay our
health-care providers in America is all wrong. Rewarding
quantity (fee-for-service payments) over quality (outcomes)
helps the doctors' and hospitals' balance sheet, but it hurts
nearly everyone else's. Changing that scenario has become the
holy grail for many looking to reform our health-care system,
including Tony Keck, director of South Carolina's Department of
Health and Human Services.  "We're spending a lot of time with
providers trying to correct problems caused by the way we pay
people," he says. "My elevator speech is all about aligning
incentives to deliver high-quality, cost-effective care." And he
hopes to achieve this by rewarding preventive care and cutting
down on all the things that put the biggest financial burden on
health care; that is, paying providers to keep people out of the
emergency room, off expensive medications and away from the
hospital once they leave it.  Ke