Healthcare cost reduction: non-obvious solutions

In Camden, New Jersey, one per cent of patients account for a third of the city’s medical costs. Photograph by Phillip Toledano.

If you’re interested in how to reduce healthcare costs you might want to watch this Frontline video from PBS. http://video.pbs.org/video/2070853636/

It’s about an article Dr. Atul Gowande wrote in the New Yorker in January that is an amazing look into non-obvious cost generation. It’s a long read, and a solution that tries to deal with this view of the problem is hard to implement at scale. Here’s the original New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_gawande

I don’t write about healthcare all the time, but trying to figure out how to deal with the real world in complex ways is how we’ll have a healthcare system that actually works, and save an amazing amount of money for all of us, as the costs for uninsured patients wind up being paid for by all of us, either through Medicaid or by shifting unpaid costs onto the insurance of private-pay patients.

 

Author: Ross

I am the Director of the Department of Early Learning for Washington State. I formerly represented the 48th Legislative District in the State House of Representatives, chairing the Appropriations committee and spent many a year at Microsoft.