Hospital Savings: Salaries for Doctors, Not Fees

By GARDINER HARRIS
NYT

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Visiting the Cleveland Clinic this week, President Obama held up that well-known hospital as a model for the rest of the country. But for most of the nation’s nearly 6,000 hospitals, copying the Cleveland Clinic would be like asking the Durham Bulls, a minor league team, to copy the New York Yankees.

A more accessible example is a hospital that sits a bit more than a home-run blast from the Baseball Hall of Fame here. Called Bassett Healthcare, this modest hospital of 180 beds delivers high-quality care at low costs in the face of federal reimbursement policies that discourage many of its best practices.

Changing those policies is crucial to the success of health care reform, economists say — something Mr. Obama said that he would do. “Our proposals would change incentives so that doctors and nurses finally are free to give patients the best care, not just the most expensive care,” the president said Thursday in Ohio.

But almost nothing in proposed legislation that has so far emerged in Congress would encourage the creation of similar hospitals.

(More here.)