As president elect Obama has set a high priority on dealing with health care for all Americans let me suggest reading the following December 2008 report from McKinsey quarterly. While I have added the link at the end of this post let me provide some of the opening text to stimulate discussion:
Welcome to The McKinsey Quarterly, the business journal of McKinsey & Company. December 2008
Making health care more affordable is the key to making the US system sustainable. We can bring three of the largest sources of underlying costs and their growth under control.
Three imperatives for improving US health care
Making health care more affordable is the key to making the US system sustainable. We can bring three of the largest sources of underlying costs and their growth under control.
DECEMBER 2008 • Paul D. Mango and Vivian E. Riefberg
Reforming the US health care system presents a daunting challenge, and there will be no shortage of proposals as the Obama administration prepares to handle it. Appropriately, the early dialogue has focused on extending coverage to the uninsured. However, any reform also needs to address the underlying problem—the relentless annual growth in the cost of health care—or reform will ultimately be inadequate. Poor affordability contributes directly to the unacceptably high number of uninsured Americans and presents a grave threat to the system’s sustainability.To stem these high and rising costs, the public and private sectors should cooperate to tackle three underlying problems, starting with the high incidence and cost of treating lifestyle- and behavior-induced diseases, such as obesity. These diseases are responsible not only for a majority of the deaths in the United States but also for the fastest-growing share of health care costs. Second, public and private stakeholders should make health care more affordable and improve its quality by minimizing the economic distortions that now tend to prevent consumers and providers from making value-conscious decisions. Finally, we need to simplify the system’s pervasive and unnecessary administrative complexity to remove the waste that drives up costs, to facilitate the real-time flow of critical information, and to promote the introduction of productivity-enhancing technologies.
Gilbert note: Before hitting the following story link let me ask you to sign up for this “free” publication which can be found at www.mckinseyquarterly.com
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Three_imperatives_for_improving_US_health_care_2274
We tax ourselves to subsidize foods that become so cheap we get fat eating them and they we tax ourselves for medical care to treat obesity diseases. We’ll save a lot by cutting out these subsidies or instead use the money to increase the number of doctors & hospitals to expand health care to all.