Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog takes a thoughtful stab at my recent paper on “pay-for-performance” and Medicare.

Pay-for-performance is one of those hip health policy buzzwords that comes with a catchy acronym: P4P. The idea is that private insurers or the government can improve health care quality through financial rewards for providers who deliver what the payer considers “quality” care. P4P stands in contrast to “pay-for-volume,” which is how third-party payers have traditionally paid providers.

My thesis is that P4P has promise, but is very, very tricky. A bureaucracy that rewards providers for what it considers high-quality care can actually encourage low-quality care for the poor saps who happen not to be the average patient.

There’s nothing wrong with P4P, so long as patients who are getting short-changed have the right to opt out (i.e., switch insurers). P4P’s potential is sure to be lost if the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) get into the game. For example, since Medicare’s P4P scheme would be emulated by Medicare Advantage plans and other private insurers, many patients would have no escape.

Holt tries to link (reconcile?) my opposition to P4P in traditional Medicare (and support for P4P in Medicare Advantage plans) with my suggestion that Medicare should subsidize seniors with a risk-adjusted voucher rather than coverage. Let me see if this helps thread the two together:

There’s a difference between helping someone in need and making all her decisions for her. Medicare has traditionally tried to do both, offering subsidies to seniors but also dictating what their coverage looks like, payment rates, etc. If CMS starts defining “quality” for 45 million seniors (and by extension, millions of non-seniors), the government will be making even more decisions that it’s really not qualified to make. Better that Congress just give seniors the cash and let them make their own decisions about coverage and care and quality. Markets have a funny way of helping people make those decisions.

Yes, there will still be some seniors who are ill-equipped to do that. But that small minority of seniors already needs — and gets — similar assistance. They can be taken care of without turning the rest of the health care sector into a high-cost, iffy-quality, rent-seeking cesspool.