Understanding Challenges in Cutting Healthcare Costs
Health care expenses are growing at a 7 percent annual rate a year which would bankrupt Medicare in nine years if continued and increase the nation's overall annual health care tab to $4 trillion in 10 years. Such rising costs are an important explanation for why the number of uninsured has soared, but everyone is affected by the cost problem. The cost issue has not caught the public imagination, unlike the dilemma of the uninsured. New or expanded medical technology use contributes 40-50 percent to annual cost increases, and the most important factor in minimizing them is regulating this technology. Universal care is the only tried and effective way for cutting healthcare costs, but it will require a significant societal change because it will appear wrong, even unethical, too many to cut the use of technology. Our health reform dialogue needs to go beyond organizational and management structures and explore our core principles of life, death, and how we distribute our resources.
One of the key choices for cutting healthcare costs with compromising results is to direct doctors and patients to use high-quality websites similar to hospitals, checks, MRI scans, and procedures at a lower price than others. One question, however, is the alteration of entrenched behaviors or habits. Payers and well-being approaches will estimate the possible financial savings that affect design and expenditures in such projects only by taking this issue into account. This text describes a mannequin developed by the College of Pennsylvania and Embedded Wellness Treatment Healthcare Transformation Institute to realistically measure the possible cost of financial savings by modifying follow-up habits.
The position that medical technology plays is the cost escalation trait that should catch our attention most. Health care analysts believe that emerging innovations or the increased use of old ones can be traced to 40-50 percent of annual cost rises. That makes technology power the most important factor in bringing down costs. At this point, ethics comes in because medical technology is highly regarded as American medicine's beloved function. Patients expect it, physicians are primarily qualified to use it, billions of dollars are sold by the medical industry, and the media loves to write about it. There are strong economic and social incentives to grow and diffuse it and the disincentives so far are weak and almost powerless. For several, cutting the use of technology would seem incorrect, even unethical.
