Health Care Finance: Economic Incentives and Productivity Enhancement

This is a study of what is happening and what should be happening in health care financing. Americans want unlimited access to the best care at affordable prices. Fiscal pressures in American health care point in all different directions, like a pile of jackstraws. This book analyzes how new payment incentives stimulate planned competition or reregulation; and the far-reaching impact these changes have on hospitals, physicians, long-term care facilities, HMOs, public health clinics, and multihospital systems. Tools for survival include better financial planning, productivity improvement, better scheduling systems, and total quality management. Steven R. Eastaugh begins his book with a general overview of cost management, accounting, product-line selection, and new payment incentives. Part 2 provides an in-depth survey of fiscal trends in long-term care, managed care, HMOs, and PPOs. Part 3 analyzes five basic strategies that a provider may consider; with special focus on market analysis, diversification, and pricing. The next part reviews physician payment options, the new Medicare 1992 payment systems for hospitals and physicians, and cost analysis of hospital patient care, research, and education. Part 5 considers productivity enhancement methods, incentives to assist productivity programmes, and the Deming method of total quality management. Part 6 focuses on investment, financing, and capital structure decisions in health care institutions and also in large multifacility systems. The last part summarizes major strategies for success in the 1990s, future policy alternatives, and suggests a number of alternative roads to universal entitlement and national health care reform.