Dive Brief:
- A group of providers—including hospitals, dialysis and homecare providers—are hoping to shoot down CMS plans to rate them on a five-star system, arguing that such ratings are more likely to confuse consumers than help them find good care.
- Large employers and patient advocates, for their part, argue that the performance ratings are needed to help consumers make better healthcare choices.
- At a minimum, opponents to the star system are hoping to extend the length of time before it is implemented, as they say they have important concerns about the methodology for making these rankings.
Dive Insight:
Like it or not, providers are going to face a growing number of rankings as insurers and employers push the burden of care choice onto consumers' shoulders. The question, as always, is whether the rankings actually measure what they purport to measure and provide meaningful help to consumers when they do their healthcare shopping. But over the short term, healthcare purchasers are growing so impatient that they're willing to accept a little imprecision.
This is going to be a painful struggle. Providers find fault, perhaps reasonably, with virtually every attempt to rank and measure their quality, an issue which has slowed the progress of rankings and exasperated those who pay for care. Eventually, though, the industry will find a way of producing those rankings that consumers can understand and use. When that day comes, providers will have no choice but to dance to their tune.
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