(Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama is enlisting private companies into his drive to change the way the country pays its medical bills, including insurers Anthem Inc. and Cigna Inc. and casino chain Caesars Entertainment Corp.

Obama and his health secretary, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, announced a partnership with private companies and medical trade associations to develop replacements for the nation's predominant method of paying for health care, called fee-for-service. Today, doctors and hospitals are paid largely based on the volume of services they provide, without regard to their quality or whether patients get better, a system that is blamed for waste and overspending on health care.

Burwell and Obama have said they want half of Medicare's $362 billion in payments for health-care services to be linked to measurements of how well patients are cared for by 2018. In some cases doctors and hospitals would be at risk of lower payments if their care is substandard.