Word: careful
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...contrast, not everyone realizes that we use too much health care; most of us assume that more treatment is better, that the best doctors are the ones who do the most to us, that our health costs are the world's highest because our health care is the world's most thorough. But a slew of research by the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice has found that as much as 30% of our annual $2 trillion-plus medical bill may be wasted on unnecessary care, mostly run-of-the-mill diagnostic tests, office visits, hospital stays, minor...
Obama has already taken several whacks at waste in energy and health care. His stimulus had more than $20 billion for energy-efficiency measures designed to slash electricity use in low-income homes, on military bases and in all kinds of government buildings, while his fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles are expected to save billions of gallons of gasoline; he's also providing government financing for electric cars, and his cash-for-clunkers program is another assault on gas guzzlers. The stimulus also included $19 billion for computerizing the medical industry, which could reduce duplicative tests and office visits, plus...
...makes good sense to give consumers of energy and health care information and incentives to deter us from overconsuming. But information has its limits. We all know exercise is good for us, but that doesn't get all of us off the La-Z-Boy. Incentives aren't everything either; wasting energy costs us money, but we do it all the time, and so do our factories and other ostensibly profit-maximizing businesses. Health care usually costs us money too, and even when co-payments are low, visiting the doctor is time-consuming and inconvenient, and staying in the hospital...
...generating plants, the utilities had an incentive to help their customers save electricity and avoid the need for new generating plants. So that's what they did. Energy providers were much better than the government at influencing the behaviors of energy consumers. "That's what we need in health care," says Dr. Elliott Fisher of the Dartmouth Institute. "When providers get rewarded for volume, they provide volume. That's got to change." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...medicine, the idea would be to reward quality rather than quantity, to give providers incentives to keep us healthy and reduce unnecessary treatments, to encourage doctors and hospitals to promote a culture of low-cost, high-quality care. One reason the Mayo Clinic already provides low-cost, high-quality care is that it keeps its doctors on salary, insulating them from fee-for-service inducements to overserve; unfortunately, Mayo is hemorrhaging cash on its Medicare patients, because the current system penalizes responsibly conservative care. Doctors don't get paid for thinking about a case or returning a phone call...