Controlling Health Care Costs

I cam across an Op Ed on controlling health care costs through bundling.  I’ve read about novel health systems that focus on high risk/frequent fliers that take daily vital signs via telemedicine and other ways to prevent costly admissions (ie: daily weights for CHF patients, daily in person clinic visits to monitor healing wounds in diabetics).    With the enormous cost of admissions, and inefficient management of patients as inpatients (ie: often working up problems that can be worked up/treated as outpatients)  I see this as a potential way to reduce the cost on our health system.

One particularly interesting statement:

Half the population — mostly young people and healthy adults — consumes just 3 percent of costs, while the sickest 10 percent consumes 64 percent

It would be interesting to see where this information comes from – and to compare insurance company statistics to see what percentage of health care costs are consumed by the sickest 10%.   Although I am a proponent of capitalism and the free market, there are areas (health insurance being one of them) where I feel that the free market cannot work.  Too many inefficiencies – administration/marketing/overhead amounting to as much as 25% of costs being directed to non healthcare related costs, too much incentive to game the system (your legal obligation is to minimize payouts to the insurees and to maximize profits).    I’ll elaborate on all of this in a future post (hopefully)