Reducing health care spending by reducing the cost of delivering health care.
I have been on a bit of a recurring theme as of late, but the great comments from each post have my brain spinning. So another focus for me recently has been the idea of insurance and the insurance industry. To keep this somewhat narrow, I will talk about liability insurance for doctors.
We have seen the numbers before, the US spends more per capita on health care than many other industrialized nations and despite these expenditures the U.S. does not appear to provide substantially greater health resources nor does it seem to score better on benchmarks as compared to other developed nations. During that campaign we heard a great deal of discussion about moving from a disease management approach to a health management approach... novel, but that speaks to changing behavior of 300 million Americans overnight (or in 8 years), and anyone who has experienced change knows that that would be painful.
Technology in medicine can play a large role in reducing many of these costs along with public policy which supports a universal approach to health insurance and electronic medical records. Technology will not only reduce the administrative expenses associated with medical care, but it will also contribute to a reduction in medical errors. Besides saving lives, this would probably put downward pressure on liability insurance rates for doctors. The advantage to this approach would be first, that it is a much smaller population, and second, financial incentive of reducing an out of pocket cost.
Now, I know that trial lawyers are a big part of the Democratic party constituency, but I wonder what role tort reform when coupled with a push for universal coverage could have on a progressive agenda. Again, if the market were to have the ability to correct itself, I think it would have done it a long time ago. So the approach would be to find a way to drive down the insurance payment of doctors which will reduce a fixed cost for most practices. I like many others do not believe that health insurance should be a profit making enterprise (liability insurance is a slightly different matter).