fee-for-service tradition is critical light
-- some good articles --

Medical Dispatch: Piecework Medicine’s money problem.
by Atul Gawande : The New Yorker
< New Yorker 04.04.2005 >

Is There a Better Way to Pay Doctors?
This so-called fee-for-service tradition has contributed to the dysfunction of the U.S. health-care system. Americans buy health care the same way they buy furniture, clothes and food: one item at a time. Physicians bill by the visit; radiologists bill by the X-ray; hospitals bill by the day. That drunken spending has led to the familiar horror-story numbers: a health-care system that gobbles up 16% of gross domestic product, compared with 9% in other industrialized countries, yet leaves the U.S. trailing those countries in such critical metrics as life expectancy and infant mortality.
by Jeffrey Kluger < Time Magazine Oct. 26, 2009 >