Focusing on Primary Care for Better Health

n the United States, we have historically invested far more in treating sickness than we do in maintaining health. The result of this imbalance is not only poorer health, but more money spent in institutions, hospitals, and nursing homes.

The road to a better health care system means correcting this imbalance. We should reinvest in what we value — primary care — as a practice, as a profession, and as an abundant resource for patients. In recent years, we have begun taking a number of meaningful steps to begin this reinvestment process. Today, we are proposing significant actions to improve how we pay primary care physicians, mental health specialists, geriatricians, and other clinicians. By better valuing primary care and care coordination, we help beneficiaries access the services they need to stay well. In addition to keeping people healthy, health care costs are lower when people have a primary care provider and team of doctors and clinicians overseeing and coordinating their care.

There are four parts to our strategy to emphasize primary care:

1. We are improving how we pay for care that we value. Today, through the Medicare physician fee schedule proposed rule, we are announcing an important set of changes that would improve how Medicare pays for primary care, care coordination, and mental health care. We conservatively estimate that these changes would result in approximately $900 million in additional funding in 2017 to physicians and practitioners providing these services. Over time, if the practitioners qualified to provide these services were to fully provide these services to all eligible beneficiaries, the increase could be as much as $5 billion in additional funding for care coordination and patient-centered care. These changes build on the work we’ve done to improve access to care in Medicaid by finalizing long-anticipatedrules that help support state delivery system reform efforts, and strengthening new policies to align payment with better, more cost-effective care and ensure that access to care is sufficient in key specialties.