Health care costs can limit small business growth, stunting a major source of new jobs.
One of the most commonly identified areas for health cost savings is fraud and abuse, but has enough effort been devoted to stopping the practices?
Patient cost sharing reduces utilization, but appears to limit use of appropriate as well as inappropriate care.
The limiting of growth in drug spending is a health care success story.
A Company mandates that its employees check their health status.
A new UnitedHealth Group report identifies $332 billion over ten years in administrative cost savings.
A consulting firm study indicates that medical expenses for commercial health plans continue to rise at a rate far above inflation.
A recent JAMA commentary gives a concise summary of the cost control problems.
A study reported in the current issue of NEJM indicates that enrollment in Part D significantly increased drug spending for those persons who previously had no or a low level of drug coverage, but also led to a lower level of medical spending.
Unhappy with its projections, Democrats have beginning disparaging the CBO’s estimates on health reform.
Reality appears to have hit the health reform train head-on in the form of the costs of expanding coverage. Maybe we should focus on getting costs under control and then coverage extensions would be affordable.
Shared decision-making for preference-sensitive conditions has the potential to improve quality and control spending. States are exploring required use of the technique and it should be considered in federal reform efforts.
The CBO’s June 16th letter to Senator Conrad is an excellent summary of health reform and cost control ideas and implementation issues.
An interesting news report on Kaiser Health News gives an indication of why health reform that affects costs will be very difficult. The story details the fight in one New Jersey town over building a new hospital.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (“AHRQ”) Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project released a report in April 2009 outlining hospitalizations that might have been preventable had the patients been receiving appropriate ambulatory care.