Medicare

Enhancing Health Care Quality Assurance Gao ID: T-HEHS-95-224 July 27, 1995

As efforts to contain health care costs have intensified in recent years, more attention has been paid to the quality of that care. Corporate purchasers of health care are concerned about problems that may arise from restricting patients' choice of providers or from giving providers financial incentives that encourage them to withhold or limit needed care, or, conversely, might encourage them to overtreat. By evaluating both cost and quality, these purchasers believe that they can select the plan that provides the best value. This testimony discusses (1) what the Health Care Financing Administration is doing to ensure that Medicare providers furnish quality care in both fee-for-service and managed care deliver systems and (2) experts' views on essential quality assurance components.



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