Incentives in Health Care Delivery

The NYtimes actually has a pretty good article about the perverse incentives in how we pay for medical care. Basically centers that would help people control diabetes and prevent nasty complications were money losers even though they produced very good results. However the nasty complications are quite profitable. This is one of the essential problems in making health care delivery more efficient. We need better ways of rewarding quality care that prevents bad outcomes because the really expensive stuff is the hospital care. Pay for performance (P4P) is a tiny step in the right direction but we need better information and all the stakeholders on board.