Value-based health care is antithetic to patient-centered care. Value-based health care is also diametrically opposed to excellence, transparency and competitive markets. And value-based health care is a shrewdly selected and disingenuously applied misnomer. Value-based pricing is not a health-care innovation. Value-based pricing is why a plastic cup filled with tepid beer costs $8 at the ballpark, why a pack of gum costs $2.50 at the airport and why an Under Armour pair of socks costs $15. Value-based pricing is based on manipulating customer perceptions and emotions, lack of sophistication, imposed shortages and limitations. Finally, value-based prices are always higher than the alternative cost-based prices, and profitability can be improved in spite of lower sales volumes.
Health care pricing is currently a smoldering mixture of ill-conceived cost-based pricing with twisted value-based pricing components. For simplicity purposes, let’s examine the pricing of physician services. As for all health care, the pricing of physician services is driven by Medicare. The methodology is neither cost-based nor value-based and simultaneously it is both. How so? Medicare fees are based on relative value units, which are basically coefficients for calculating the cost of providing various services in various practices, of various types and specialties. The price, which is also the cost since it includes physician take home compensation, is calculated by plugging in a dollar value, called conversion factor. The conversion factor, which is supposed to represent costs, is not in any way related to actual production costs, but instead it is calculated so the total cost of physician services will not exceed the Medicare budget for these services. Buried in this complex pricing exercise is a value-based component. A committee of physicians gets to decide the requisite amount of physician effort, skills and education, for each service. Whereas in other markets the value decision hinges on buyer perceptions, in health care it is masquerading as cost.
The commercial insurance market adds a more familiar layer of complexity to the already convoluted Medicare fee schedule baseline. Unlike Medicare fees, which are nonnegotiable, private payers will engage in value-based negotiations with larger physician groups and health systems that employ them. Monopolistic health systems in a given geographical area can pretty much charge whatever the market can bear, just like the beer vendor at your favorite ballpark does, and brand name institutions get to flex their medical market muscles no differently than Under Armour does for socks. This is value-based pricing at its best. Small practices have of course no negotiation power in the insurer market, but as shortages of physician time and availability begin to emerge, a direct to consumer concierge market is being created, providing a new venue for independent physicians, primary care in particular, to move to a more profitable value-based pricing model.
Unsurprisingly this entire scheme is not working very well for any of the parties involved, except private insurers who thrive on complexity and the associated waste of resources. Upon what must have been a very careful examination of the payment system, Medicare concluded that it does not wish to pay physicians for services that fail to lower Medicare expenditures, and Medicare named this new payment strategy value-based health care, not because it has anything in common with value-based pricing, but because it sounds good. Another frequently used term in health care is value-based purchasing, which is attempting to inject the notion of quality as the limiting factor for cost containment. However, since Medicare is de facto setting the prices for its purchases, there is really no material difference between these two terms.
