Health Care Value Based Purchasing

Value-based Purchasing as Required by the Affordable Care Act

Taylor Bontrager

University of Saint Francis

It is important that Americans understand their healthcare policies. Over the last few years healthcare has changed drastically. Healthcare is very important, as unfortunately everyone at some point will require medical care. Medical care is very expensive due to its nature. Understanding the different health care policies available can help Americans save money by allowing them to obtaining the best health care policy that is appropriate for them. The new healthcare policy put into place is the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA is two separate pieces of legislation. The first part is the Patient Protection

This includes care that is provided in inpatient hospital settings. Value-based purchasing attaches to the payment system that is the largest share of Medicare spending. This effects payment for over 3,500 inpatient hospital stays across the country. Congress in Section 3001(a) of the ACA authorized this legislation, Inpatient Hospital VBP. Section 501(a) of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 authorized the use of hospital quality data reporting infrastructure developed for the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program (Hospital Value-Based Purchasing,

The hospitals receive incentive payments under the Hospital VBP by either how well they perform each measure or how much they improve their performance during a baseline period. A few examples of how quality is measured are nurse communication, doctor communication, pain management, discharge information, and a few other aspects (Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program, 2011). Healthcare can be very confusing to consumers. New practices and policies never make understanding healthcare any easier. The new Affordable Care Act has many parts and uses Value-Based Purchasing. Value-Based purchasing is important to understand so that consumers can make educated decisions about hospital and doctors. These facilities are now reimbursed based on the quality of care they provide. This makes it important for consumers to choose facilities that accept their healthcare due to this to reduce out of pocket