Washington and Lee law professor Tim Jost has a new article out on health care reform, cross published by the New England Journal of Medicine and the Harvard Business Review. The article, titled “Regulating Private Health Insurance to Promote High-Value Health Care,” looks at how Title 1 of the Affordable Care Act impacts previous efforts to encourage the creation of high-value health care. In conclusion, Prof. Josts writes:
In adopting the ACA, Congress embraced an ambitious agenda of regulation and public reporting to encourage private insurers to improve the value of health care. Congress tried to encourage insurers to pursue activities that some were already pursuing and to emulate value-purchasing initiatives in the Medicare and Medicaid program. HHS [Health and Human Services] seems, however, to have made private insurance value purchasing a low priority. It is likely to be several years before we learn whether the ACA provisions that address private insurers will in fact improve the value of health care.
The article is available for download from the NEJM website.
