Joseph P. Newhouse – författare

Interim Report of the Committee on Geographic Variation in Health Care Spending and Promotion of High-Value Health Care: Preliminary Committee Observations is designed to provide the committee's preliminary observations for the 113th Congress as it considers further Medicare reform. This report contains only key preliminary observations related primarily to the committee's commissioned analyses of Medicare Parts A (Hospital Insurance program), B (Supplementary Medical Insurance program) and D (outpatient prescription drug benefit), complemented by other empirical investigations. It does not contain any observations related to the committee's commissioned analyses of the commercial insurer population, Medicare Advantage, or Medicaid, which will be presented in the committee's final report after completion of quality-control activities. This interim report excludes conclusions or recommendations related to the committee's consideration of the geographic value index or other payment reforms designed to promote highvalue care. Additional analyses are forthcoming, which will influence the committee's deliberations.These analyses include an exploration of how Medicare Part C (Medicare Advantage) and commercial spending, utilization, and quality vary compared with, and possibly are influenced by, Medicare Parts A and B spending, utilization, and quality. The committee also is assessing potential biases that may be inherent to Medicare and commercial claims-based measures of health status. Based on this new evidence and continued review of the literature, the committee will confirm the accuracy of the observations presented in this interim report and develop final conclusions and recommendations, which will be published in the committee's final report.

Health care in the United States is more expensive than in other developed countries, costing $2.7 trillion in 2011, or 17.9 percent of the national gross domestic product. Increasing costs strain budgets at all levels of government and threaten the solvency of Medicare, the nation's largest health insurer. At the same time, despite advances in biomedical science, medicine, and public health, health care quality remains inconsistent. In fact, underuse, misuse, and overuse of various services often put patients in danger. Many efforts to improve this situation are focused on Medicare, which mainly pays practitioners on a fee-for-service basis and hospitals on a diagnoses-related group basis, which is a fee for a group of services related to a particular diagnosis. Research has long shown that Medicare spending varies greatly in different regions of the country even when expenditures are adjusted for variation in the costs of doing business, meaning that certain regions have much higher volume and/or intensity of services than others. Further, regions that deliver more services do not appear to achieve better health outcomes than those that deliver less.Variation in Health Care Spending investigates geographic variation in health care spending and quality for Medicare beneficiaries as well as other populations, and analyzes Medicare payment policies that could encourage high-value care. This report concludes that regional differences in Medicare and commercial health care spending and use are real and persist over time. Furthermore, there is much variation within geographic areas, no matter how broadly or narrowly these areas are defined. The report recommends against adoption of a geographically based value index for Medicare payments, because the majority of health care decisions are made at the provider or health care organization level, not by geographic units. Rather, to promote high value services from all providers, Medicare and Medicaid Services should continue to test payment reforms that offer incentives to providers to share clinical data, coordinate patient care, and assume some financial risk for the care of their patients. Medicare covers more than 47 million Americans, including 39 million people age 65 and older and 8 million people with disabilities.Medicare payment reform has the potential to improve health, promote efficiency in the U.S. health care system, and reorient competition in the health care market around the value of services rather than the volume of services provided. The recommendations of Variation in Health Care Spending are designed to help Medicare and Medicaid Services encourage providers to efficiently manage the full range of care for their patients, thereby increasing the value of health care in the United States.

From 1971 to 1982, researchers at the RAND Corporation devised an experiment to address two key questions in health care financing: how much more medical care will people use if it is provided free of charge? and what are the consequences for their health? This book presents a comprehensive account of the experiment and its findings. It will be an invaluable teaching tool and reference for anyone concerned with health-care policy.

Poor health habits (drinking, smoking, lack of exercise) obviously take their toll on individuals and their families. The costs to society are less obvious but certainly more far-reaching. This investigation is the first to quantify the financial burden these detrimental habits place on American taxpayers. Willard Manning and his colleagues measure the direct costs of poor health habits (fire damage, motor vehicle accidents, legal fees), as well as collectively financed costs (medical care, employee sick leave, group health and life insurance, nursing home care, retirement pensions, liability insurance). Consider two co-workers covered by their employer's health plan: both pay the same premium, yet if one drinks heavily, the other--through their mutual insurance program--involuntarily funds the resulting health problems. After laying out their conceptual framework, methods, and analytical approach, the authors describe precisely how and to what extent drinking, smoking, and lack of exercise are currently subsidized, and make recommendations for reducing or reallocating the expense. They present, for example, a persuasive case for raising excise taxes on alcohol. The authors correlate their data to make costs comparable, to avoid double counting, and to determine the exact costs of each of these poor health habits and some of their findings are quite surprising. This unique study will be indispensable to public health policy specialists and researchers, as well as to health economists.