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“Courts can’t take more cuts.” “Health costs rising for city.” “Some part-timers have city benefits.”
Very frequently, it seems, I open The Gleaner to find articles about the rising cost of health care. The Kentucky courts resist further cuts in their budgets to shift the money to pay for increased Medicaid costs. The city must budget an additional half-million plus more dollars to pay for higher health care costs. A writer questions why part-time employees can receive health care insurance.
But in none of these articles do I see anything about getting to the root cause of the problem — the actual cost of health care. In the instances mentioned above, the issue really boils down to the fact that the actual cost of providing services (or at least what is being billed by health care providers) is rapidly rising, much more than the inflation rate.
The Kaiser Family Foundation, in a March 2009 report of a study by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), indicated that “the U.S. spent over $2.5 trillion on health care in 2009, or $8,160 per U.S. resident or 17.6 percent of GDP. In 1970, U.S. health care spending was about $75 billion, or $356 per resident, and accounted for 7.2 percent of GDP.
Health care spending has risen about 2.4 percentage points faster than GDP since 1970. CMS projects that by 2018, health care spending will be over $4.3 trillion, or $13,100 per resident, and account for 20.3 percent of GDP.” And this report does not include the additional increases recently seen subsequent to passage of the current health care bill.
At some point in time, there must be a shift in focus to a very aggressive attack on the actual cost of providing effective health care. There are many opportunities to attack actual cost drivers, among them tort reform, removal of state boundaries when shopping for insurance (increased competition), review of current treatment protocols, an online database of charges for services to allow the user to “shop” for their care, improving efficiency of health care provider services, streamlining the billing process, aggressive promotion of wellness programs.
Perhaps our local Methodist Hospital might begin the process by hosting a public forum to make the public more aware of what is being done, and might be done, locally to reduce health care costs. Perhaps our state government representatives might participate by explaining what is being or could be done at the state level to lower health care costs.
It would be a refreshing change to have a public discourse about issues which can actually impact health care in a positive way, instead of just arguing about how to pay for it.
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