Should Physicians be Paid Based on Professional Quality and Cost-Effectiveness Rather than Simply Completing a Job?

Physicians are now paid just for completing some job. The job may be reading an X-ray or treating an infection. The payment is essentially the same whether the job was performed with excellence and contributed to a successful outcome or whether the job was simply performed one way or another. This approach as practiced in the United States may lead to sub-optimal results but at higher costs of medical care. In the era of health maintenance organizations, payment made to participating doctors is based on doing a job which provides the greatest service with the higher rewards and least expense to the industry. In these days with the need to reduce the costs of medical care, thought has been given to having a payment incentive to doctors for not just completing some job but ending up with high professional quality and an ending that is cost-effective. My question is whether physicians should be paid for such performance. That means, if the performance results in a lesser quality, the physician should not be paid or paid less.

Read the article “The Risks of Rewards in Health Care: How Pay-for-performanceCould Threaten, or Bolster, Medical Professionalism” by Matthew K. Wynia, MD, MP in the Journal of General Internal Medicine Volume 24 Number 7 2009 and available at this link:http://www.springerlink.com/content/xq2151wv04r4xx37/fulltext.pdf

Return and write your opinion here on my question. ..Maurice.