全球智库信息集成服务系统

Key Findings

1. Medicare’s prospective payment system (PPS) did not lead to significant declines in the quality of hospital care.
2. Mortality rates declined for all patient groups examined, and other outcome measures also showed improvement.
3. However, more Medicare patients were discharged from hospitals in unstable condition after PPS was implemented. Determining the seriousness of this problem requires further monitoring and study.

Faced with sharply escalating Medicare costs in the early 1980s, the federal government completely revised the way Medicare pays hospitals for treating elderly patients. The governing agency, the Health Care Financing Administration, switched from a retrospective fee-for-service system to a prospective payment system (PPS). Under PPS, hospitals receive a fixed amount for treating patients diagnosed with a given illness, regardless of the length of stay or type of care received.