The Health Care Blog: AHLA on the Stark Law and its Revision: a Step Towards Holistic & Ethical Reform

By KATHLEEN M. BOOZANG Health reform that focuses exclusively on health care finance — that is, how we pay for universal access to insurance coverage — will not produce successful reform. Reform must be holistic, with a focus on the entire system, as well as its component parts, including whether the system is structured to deliver the right kind of health care services in the most appropriate setting, whether we have sufficient quantity and kind of health care professionals and technology geographically dispersed to provide the health care services that people will presumably have insurance to access, and whether the system properly incentivizes health care professionals to make decisions that are efficient, effective, and in patients’ best interests. This is a massive undertaking, with a tremendous risk that important components will be overlooked precisely because of the size of the undertaking. The Stark Law represents the kind of on-the-ground healthcare delivery problems that healthcare reform must tackle. Read More

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• AHLA Public Interest Committee Publishes Stark Law White Paper (healthcarebloglaw.blogspot.com)