Hospitals: The New Teachers' Unions?

Are hospitals the new public-school teachers' unions?

From the New York Times today:

More generally, [hospitals] are apprehensive about Medicare’s plans to reward and penalize hospitals based on untested measures of efficiency that include spending per beneficiary.

A major goal of the new health care law, often overlooked, is to improve “the quality and efficiency of health care” by linking payments to the performance of health care providers. The new Medicare initiative, known as value-based purchasing, will redistribute money among more than 3,100 hospitals.

Medicare will begin computing performance scores in July, for monetary rewards and penalties that start in October 2012.

The desire to reward hospitals for high-quality care is not new or controversial. ... However, adding in “efficiency” is entirely new and controversial, as no consensus exists on how to define or measure the efficiency of health care providers.

One of the truest and most powerful conservative ideas of the 1980s and 1990s was to stop measuring our commitment to "education" by measuring "inputs" (spending per student, class-size)  and instead to measure "outputs" (student learning). Schools and teachers resisted, but were rightly over-ruled. Now the country is heading to a re-enactment of this debate with health. Here's hoping that Republicans can overcome both political opportunism and also the temptation of donations from the hospital industry and again adhere to the right side of the issue.

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