New Report on Getting the Best Care
by Run 75441
New Report on Getting the Best Care
Both Matthew Yglesias at Slate and Sarah Kliff at WonkBlog and a host of other sites have posted some interesting results coming out of a recent study by the Institute of Medicine Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America.
Unfortunately as a lowly and unpaid (99% of the time) blogger, I do not have access to the entire report. What I do have is a abstract of what the report is about and some of the charts placed on Wonkblog.
We spend $750 billion on unnecessary health care. Two charts explain why. This report documents much of the whys to a much needed Healthcare Reform in the numeric of it. Phillip Longman in his book The Best Care Anywhere touches upon a similar transition in the VA administration and the experiences of his and Timothy Noah’s wives in being treated for cancer. Unfortunately, the best named hospitals and the best insurance does not guarantee the best care. Too much is spent inefficiently on the wrong type of care.
The second series of chart is an accounting of how some of these expenditures are made within the system. Again, this is something which Phillip Longman touched upon with his book on the VA and how they overcame the inefficiencies. Sarah Kliff at Wonkblog calls it creating an environment in which it is easy to create waste. When healthcare and its associated industries were not the monsters in cost, no one paid attention to the cost, loss of efficiency, and the lack of quality outcome in treating patients. We spent for the services and not the outcome with the results being a higher cost.
Constantly targeted within today’s healthcare system is the cost of treating the elderly. While it is true as we grow older, the costs of treating us increase due to our aging and failure to care for ourselves. Within the system it is easy to have increased waste as treatments and records may not be logged to computer leading to duplicate treatments and a lack of coordination amongst way to many doctors in treating patients. It has happened where a group of consulting doctors can be describing treatments when the oncologist knows there is little more to be done.
What does the IOM recommend? I will leave you with Sarah Kliff’s post on Wonk Blog to find out. What’s Possible for Healthcare
Getting back to today’s politics between Romney and Ryan vs Obama, would you want more of the same? More of today’s private market with its rising healthcare cost is precisely what is being advocated by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. More to come.
I’ve been reading IOM reports for decades and almost all of them have been highly negative, highly critical and full of allegations that are truthy ($750B?) but cannot be proven or dis-proven.
We have a national trend here, people who bitch and write criticism get more respect than people who do actual work.
I heard an example of where unnecessary health care may have long term bad effects, unneeded CT scans. It appears that if someone faints for unknown reasons a CT scan is done, but the radiation dose is not tracked. Suggestion is to go back to more watchful waiting were the CT scan is not a first reaction. Of course the physician owned imaging centers would make less money so it won’t happen.
Ah well Rusty…yes for any writing, especially in an election year…While I was not able to access the study, a few examples and a sense of IMO would be more useful.
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