Healthcare Madness

March madness is here. If you're like me and you don't follow basketball at all, here's a handy dandy guide to participating in the office pool. Maybe you won't win the pot, but with some luck maybe you'll have a decent showing...

So much focus is on the cost of healthcare in the U.S., one economist is a proponent of assessing the quality of care

America's fee-for-service system does not require doctors to measure. It rewards them for each instance of delivered ''care,'' Cutler notes, but not necessarily for the end result -- for ''health.''

Pay for performance, not for just performing a service! Healthcare in the U.S. is a big mess right now, how can we fix it?

''You manage what you measure.''

A program with huge benefits for society (and for patients) offered only a marginal incentive to the health plan to create it... This is why closed-loop systems -- systems in which patients made healthy don't leave -- tend to work best.