President Obama will mark his healthcare law’s fifth birthday partly by talking about what it hasn’t accomplished.
In a speech Wednesday commemorating his signature domestic achievement, the president will also talk about what he’d like to see happen next with health reform, White House officials said.
That involves improving quality in the U.S. healthcare system so that doctors are encouraged to spend more time with their patients, focus on preventing diseases in the first place, coordinate with their patients’ other caregivers and cut down on unnecessary tests and procedures.
Towards that end, Obama will announce a network of consumer groups, hospitals, doctors, employers and insurers the administration is dubbing the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network.
Officials said Tuesday that more than 2,800 groups are “interested” in joining the network, which will involve the groups making specific commitments that promote healthcare quality, like incentivizing doctors to spend more time with patients or improving communication between specialists and primary care doctors.
Those healthcare goals are broadly supported by Republicans, too, although they say the first step toward improving U.S. healthcare would be repealing the Affordable Care Act and starting over. Democrats passed the healthcare law in 2010 without gaining any GOP votes.
The network is intended to be the administration’s next step in moving toward improving care quality, after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced in January it intends to award 30 percent of Medicare payments through new, innovative ways by the end of next year.
“There’s more work to do to ensure every American receives the highest quality of care when they need it,” said White House deputy chief of staff Kristie Canegallo.
The American Cancer Society, the American Hospital Association and the AARP are some groups that have already signed on, officials said. So has the National Partnership for Women and Families, the group said Wednesday.
“During this week when we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act … it is fitting that we also focus on the ways we are changing our healthcare system to ensure that it delivers value-based, quality care to patients and families,” said the group’s president Debra Ness.
