Why such a hurry?

Over the past decade or so, federal health policy has chased health care costs that grew out of control largely because of federal intervention in the form of the Medicare/Medicaid programs. Having implemented a prospective pricing system for institutional providers, the government has followed up with a resource-based relative value system for physicians. The prognosis for this new effort may be no better than that for past attacks on health care costs, and the outcome could be substantially worse.