Measuring health care success based on outcomes

Joe Paduda has an interesting post over on his Managed Care Matters blog.

In it he says the entire health care debate, which seems to run mostly toward free market vs. single-payer regulated, is a waste of energy, print, brain space...because we're only debating processes, not how we measure outcomes.

Of course Joe doesn't try to answer what would be the critical question: what equals positive outcome in a medical situation? I mean, everyone dies, so eventually every medical situation ends with what would seem to be the ultimate failure.

Would that mean that any money expended trying to either a) extend one's life or b) makes one's last days comfortable is money less well-spent?

I agree it's something that all the debaters seem almost afraid to throw into the mix...but I fear that an entirely outcome-based system would become just as unbalanced as our current process-oriented one.

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[Andrew Spark]

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