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How Good is the Quality of Care in Medicare?


Friday, May 06, 2005

The federal government’s responsibility to provide access to health care for the nation’s 41 million Medicare beneficiaries implies another obligation: to spend taxpayer dollars wisely. This means assuring that the $250 billion+ spent for Medicare goes for services that are safe, timely and effective.

How well is the Medicare program meeting these goals? Why is there an inverse relationship between how much is spent per Medicare beneficiaries across the states and the quality of care rankings for those states? Why are there unexplained variations in care at the end of life? What is the relationship between staffing levels and quality? What should be done to boost the quality of care for Medicare beneficiaries while assuring the most effective use of resouces?

To explain the wealth of data on this subject and highlight important trends, the Alliance for Health Reform and The Commonwealth Fund co-sponsored a May 6, 2005 briefing. The focus was on the care for the elderly living in the community. Panelists were: Glenn Hackbarth, chairman of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission; Sheila Leatherman and Douglas McCarthy, co-authors of Quality of Health Care for Medicare Beneficiaries: A Chartbook (released by The Commonwealth Fund the day of this briefing); John Rother, director of policy and strategy at AARP; and Christine Cassel, president of the American Board of Internal Medicine. Anne-Marie Audet of The Commonwealth Fund made opening remarks, and Ed Howard of the Alliance for Health Reform moderated. A CD-ROM version of the chartbook was available to those attending. (Sheila Leatherman is a research professor in the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Co-author Douglas McCarthy is president of Issues Research, Inc., in Durango, Colorado.)

For resources from this briefing, contact the Alliance at info@allhealth.org or 202/789-2300.

Speakers

Glenn Hackbarth, MedPAC, Speaker
Sheila Leatherman, UNC Program on Health Outcomes, Speaker
Douglas McCarthy, Issues Research, Inc., Speaker
John Rother, AARP, Speaker
Christine Cassel, American Board of Internal Medicine, Speaker
Ed Howard, Alliance for Health Reform, Moderator

Transcript, Event Summary and/or Webcast and Podcast

Transcript: How Good is the Quality of Care in Medicare? (Adobe Acrobat PDF), 5/6/2005
Full Webcast/Podcast: How Good is the Quality of Care in Medicare?
The transcript, full webcast and podcast for this briefing are provided by Kaiser Family Foundation.

Source Materials

Sourcelist: How Good is the Quality of Care in Medicare? (Word Document), Alliance for Health Reform, 5/6/2005

 

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