Would a Ratings System Improve Health Care?

ByABC News
October 16, 2006, 7:22 PM

Oct. 17, 2006 — -- ABC News asked a panel of experts five questions about what it would take to fix the health care system, including physicians, business school professors and consumer advocates.

Below is the second batch of answers they brought back for this five part series -- some surprising, some simple.

Dr. Alan Garber
Director, Center for Health Policy, Stanford University

Despite all the talk about improving quality, we pay doctors and hospitals that provide substandard care just about as much as we pay doctors and hospitals that provide superior care. We need better ways to measure the quality of care, and we need to pay less for poor quality care, and pay more for high quality care.

Dr. David Gratzer
Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a licensed physician in the United States and Canada. Gratzer wrote "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care"

Quality will come from competition. As different providers innovate, we will find ways of better building the health care "mousetrap." Unfortunately, state and federal governments have spent the last 60 years undermining competition.

Regina Herzlinger
Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the Nancy R. McPherson professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School

That which gets measured, gets managed. Measure it; audit the data, and make them readily available. If I needed a mastectomy, I would want to know how good my doctor is in performing this kind of surgery on people like me, wouldn't you?

Dr. Joanne Lynn
Physician and researcher with the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Clinical Standards and Quality at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services

We are coming a long way in making quality visible, though we have a long way to go. Quality is going to mean different things to different people. For the young mother, nothing is as important as protecting the health of her baby. For the elderly person facing frailty and self-care problems, reliable long-term support for nutrition, hygiene, and comfort are important. We will need to customize our understandings of quality and value to the priorities of people facing different kinds of challenges and opportunities.