Money we shouldn?t be spending

This is the sort of thing that matters a lot for health-care costs but doesn?t get anyone?s partisan juices flowing:

Adverse medical events ? medical interventions that cause harm or injury to a patient separate from the underlying medical condition ? are unfortunately an all-too-frequent occurrence in US hospitals. They may cause as many as 187,000 deaths in hospitals each year, and 6.1�million injuries, both in and out of hospitals. We estimate the annual social cost of these adverse medical events based on what people are willing to pay to avoid such risks in non-health care settings. That social cost ranges from $393�billion to $958�billion, amounts equivalent to 18�percent and 45�percent of total U.S. health care spending in 2006.�

Medical errors are that most mythical of budgetary creatures: waste that adds up to a lot of money, not to mention a lot of pain and death. The Affordable Care Act had a number of proposals to reduce medical errors and mistakes (penalizing hospitals with high readmission or infection rates, etc). Peter Orszag has proposed a pretty smart idea for how to use medical-malpractice reform to cut down on medical errors rather than just jury awards. Atul Gawande has a great article on this subject that also offers some ideas.

But this is what I mean when I say that cutting health-care costs is ultimately about making it cheaper to treat sick people, not just changing who pays for their treatment. I can tell you a story about how the ACA?s many, many efforts to address medical errors might work to do that. If Medicare?s penalties for high-readmission rates actually force hospitals to guard against some of these errors, that would save a lot of money, not just shift it. It?s much harder to tell that story about Ryan?s plan, which fractures Medicare into a bunch of smaller providers, none of whom will have much power over hospitals. And yet Ryan is claiming his plan will save vastly more money than the ACA.

Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=b97d19403f25236ba6fdfcb08c8366b8

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