Building a Healthcare System from Scratch, Part 3: Getting the Incentives Right

carrotIn Part 1, I enumerated the jobs we want a healthcare system to do for us. In Part 2, I explained which parties in the healthcare system (providers or insurers) have incentives to perform each job. The next part of the Healthcare Incentives Framework is the biggest challenge: how do we shape those incentives so that they don’t just reward parties for merely performing those jobs, but so they also encourage them to perform their jobs in the best way possible? (“Best way possible” will be more precisely defined below.)

To understand this discussion, two key definitions must be absolutely clear.

First, the definition of value.

Value = Quality / Price

High value can be found at any price point. For example, it could be reasonable quality for a super low price, or it could be the absolute best quality for a not-crazy-high price. It just depends on how much money is available to be spent.

And just as a brief sidenote, I’ll mention that “quality” has many facets, and it’s the patient who–as the person consuming the service–ultimately gets to decide what constitutes quality. And “price” denotes the actual total amount of money paid for the service.

Second, the definition of a financial incentive. A financial incentive is something that rewards behavior with increased profit. Profit is the key here. Companies (or, the people who run them) don’t take huge risks and expend great effort that won’t result in more money for them. (This also applies to non-profit organizations, only they call it “surplus.”) So a project that is projected to increase revenues but also increase costs just as much is a waste of effort from a company’s standpoint.

With those two definitions in mind, here is the principle: Our goal is to create financial incentives that reward value for patients. In other words, a provider or insurer needs to make more profit when they provide higher value for patients. This would motivate them to out-compete and out-innovate their competitors. And the form of that competition wouldn’t be destructive corner-cutting and responsibility-avoiding–it would be to actually provide higher value for patients.

Instead of hospitals spending fortunes on beautiful lobbies, they would be competing on how to make care cheaper, faster, and more convenient. Because that’s how they would make more profit.

Instead of insurers climbing over each other to find ways to cream skim the healthiest patients and creatively design networks to get sick patients to avoid them, they would be competing on how to most efficiently provide cost-saving prevention and how to have the best customer experience. Because that’s how they would make more profit.

Some say financial incentives have no place in healthcare. What they don’t understand is that there will always be financial incentives in any industry where people get paid for their work. We can’t ignore the inescapable presence of financial incentives in healthcare. But we can shape them in a way that motivates providers and insurers to maximize the value delivered to patients.


In Part 4, I’ll enumerate the four levers that affect profit, which will then lead to an explanation of the barriers healthcare systems commonly have to those levers being used to reward value with profit.

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