Indeed, the quest to save dollars in the nation’s $2.1 trillion annual health care bill is becoming a lucrative market of its own. Thousands of companies, large and small, are pitching cost-saving ideas that range from electronic patient records to new medical devices. It’s not all marketing hype. Experts in health policy agree that there is a real opportunity to curb health spending, which last year was the equivalent of $7,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. Studies predict a gain of as much as 30 percent in efficiency, mostly through reducing unnecessary tests and prescriptions, paperwork and medical mistakes. Such streamlining would not cut the nation’s total medical spending, as long as there is a growing aging population with ever-increasing health needs. But certain measures are expected to help keep costs from spiraling. Every cost-saving product or service requires an upfront investment, which bets that it will produce overall savings. And so the paradox kicks in. “There is money to be saved, but it is not going to be cheap,” said David M. Cutler, a health economist at Harvard University. The path to saving can be particularly uncertain in the United States’ fragmented health care economy — a mix of risk, regulation and profit in which the incentives are often contradictory. A physician, for example, may try new approaches to trim the costs of providing care, but the results usually benefit insurers more than doctors. Strides in efficiency may be good for society, though there may be scant financial motivation for the doctors themselves.
Please click on the link below to read the New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/business/businessspecial3/11save.html?_r=1&ref=businessspecial3&oref=slogin
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