December 15, 2005

Coalition Calls Upon Congress to Pass Medicare Value Purchasing Act

NCQA, AARP, the AFL-CIO and nearly a dozen other influential organizations representing tens of millions of Americans called upon Congress today to support legislation designed to improve the care delivered to the more than 40 million beneficiaries of the Medicare program. The legislation in question would link pay to performance on quality measures, an increasingly popular strategy among the nation's private health care systems. Pay-for-performance has also been endorsed by the Institute of Medicine and the influential Medicare Payment Advisory Comission; more than a hundred pay-for-performance pilot programs are beginning to demonstrate that linking pay with performance is an effective strategy for improving quality and controlling costs.