Relationship Between Healthcare Cost and Quality

Relationship between Healthcare Cost and Quality
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Relationship between Healthcare Cost and Quality
Introduction
The United States health care is extremely expensive. Even though the overall rate of spending in the healthcare industry has reduced significantly in the last ten years, the total per capita expenditure is still 200% higher in the US as compared to other first class nations. Despite the existence of the high costs, the United States is currently ranked at position twenty in terms of life expectancy and also performs poorly on other indicators of quality. This phenomenon has caused researchers to try and establish definite areas of wasteful spending. The efforts are largely focused on how the spending varies on regions and especially on the area of Medicare. After establishing that the regional disparity in expenditure is not widely connected with the spending outcomes, this research paper examines the proposals that have been given by the public and private sectors in trying to minimize unwarranted deviation in treatment.
The Role of Public and Private Agencies in Addressing Cost and Quality
The private sector has been actively involved in trying to improve the quality of medical care while at the same time reducing any extra costs. The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) has come up with an initiative dubbed Choosing Wisely that is geared towards encouraging stakeholders within the health care industry to make decisions on care based on the personal needs of the patient in order to make sure that only the necessary tests are carried out. This initiative encourages physicians to avoid conducting all the unnecessary procedures that do not bring any benefit and can instead harm the patient. The commitment of these private bodies has the capacity of bringing down the national variation. However, both researchers and doctors have worked hard to identify definite examples where treatment should be withdrawn. However, there is very little evidence to show that physicians have overused such services. For this reason, the reduction of such tests at the national level would have a very small impact in reducing health care spending (Cuckler, et al, 2013).
Apart from the efforts put in by the private sector, the public sector has also been in the forefront in trying to check the excessive cost of health care while at the same time maintaining quality. In 2012, the Congress made a request to the Institute of Internal Medicine (IOM) to establish a commission of inquiry that would examine how Medicate expenditure is varied across geographical regions. The mandate of the committee was specifically to find out if the reimbursements made to Medicare should be adjusted depending on the value of the services given by the hospitals to make sure that the generated profit matched with the cost. The findings of the committee showed that clinician b...