Woes of a Disjointed Healthcare System

As we all know, the cost of healthcare in the United States is high and growing.  Expenditures surpassed $2.3 trillion in 2008, more than three times the $714 billion spent in 1990, and over eight times the $253 billion spent in 1980. Stemming this growth has become a major policy priority, as the government, employers, and consumers increasingly struggle to keep up with health care costs. (Source: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Office of the Actuary, National Health Statistics Group, National Health Care Expenditures Data, January 2010.)

The healthcare industry, patient advocates and governmental bodies are pursuing many solutions.  These include, but are not limited to:

• Investment in information technology
• Improving quality and efficiency (e.g., encouraging evidence-based medicine, reducing unnecessary variations in care) – Some experts estimate that up to 30% of health care is unnecessary, emphasizing the need to streamline the health care system and eliminate this needless spending.
• Adjusting provider compensation (e.g., sharing cost savings)
• Government regulation (e.g., recent Medicare initiatives to control costs)
• Encouraging prevention
• Increasing consumer involvement in purchasing
• Altering the tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance

One of the strengths of our current healthcare system, as well as one of its weaknesses, is that it is a market-based system.  We have multiple providers competing against each other.  The strength is that competition leads to innovation if not the low cost we might expect.  However, a market-based, competitive system also leads to a system that can make it difficult for providers to work together.  The resulting lack of coordination can have a negative impact on patient care and lost opportunities for reducing costs.

For example, MedSpan has a client that provides patient care in all 50 states.  They considered developing a unique program that could extend the reach of physicians’ care between visits, enhance patient-physician relationships, encourage therapy compliance and afford the opportunity for earlier identification of disease progression.  However, one of the challenges the program faces is that without coverage of the program by all health plans in a geographic region, physicians do not easily know which patients they can refer to the program.

Assume that only a few health plans provided coverage for our client’s program.  A physician would need to 1) determine that a patient would benefit from the program, 2) determine if the patient’s health plan provides coverage for the program and 3) refer the patient to the provider (my client), 4) develop a relationship with the provider and 5) exchange information to monitor progress, thereby ensuring a benefit for the patient and physician.

That’s a lot of work for physicians who, typically, do not have the time available.  This is especially true if only 5 or 10 patients might benefit from the program and only a few might have coverage.  As a result, a potentially beneficial program falls through the cracks due to a disjointed healthcare system.

A system integrated through better information systems would address some of the challenges the above program faces, but not all.  An extreme solution would be a single-payer system.  While facilitating coordination of care, a single payer system would engender a host of other issues.  For example, the innovation that competition generates may diminish.  Therefore, the question to address is how close should we move to a single payer system while maintaining the competitive, free market that is the foundation of the American economy?

That’s an issue we’ll address in a future entry into our blog.

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