Over 100 health care companies – including providers, insurers, biopharmaceutical companies, professional associations and consumer groups – joined to write the Trump administration to urge him to “continue focusing on value-based, patient-centered payment models that incent healthcare innovation.”  The letter, available here, stressed that “through private and public sector alignment, the move toward value-based care is succeeding, measurably improving healthcare quality and contributing to historically low costs.”  Now, they say, “is not the time for policymakers to signal a shift away from value-based care. . . .”

According to the authors of the letter, the move towards value-based healthcare delivery system has been spurred by nearly 20 years of bipartisan leadership.  This move is important because the 50-year old fee-for-service system currently in place has grown extraordinarily complex, and this complexity blocks the efforts providers have been making “to measurably improve quality, reduce costs and take accountability for populations of patients.” 

The consortium who joined together in signing the letter “share a vision for a modernized, sustainable healthcare system based on” principles that include (1) empowering and engaging patients to make better, more informed healthcare decisions, (2) developing relevant and consistent measures of provider performance, and (3) using “payment models that promote collaborative financial and care coordination arrangements using incentives that align payers, healthcare providers, providers of long-term care services and clinicians.” 

The letter is signed by many key players in the healthcare field, including Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Anthem; hospital providers; and numerous professional associations, including the AHA, the American Medical Association, the American Pharmacists Association, and the American Society of Anesthesiologists.  The overall goal, as stated in the letter, is to reach a point “where value-based healthcare becomes a sustainable marketplace for generations of Americans to come.”