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Photograph by Opto |
This can’t go on. We cannot continue to have rising costs, uneven quality, and shrinking access to care. The appalling realities of the chaos we call health care (don’t bother calling it a system) have spawned a cottage industry of pundits, consultants, critics, and professional headscratchers. And this industry has spawned an ever-growing library of books hawking solutions, ranging roughly from the “manna from heaven” vision to the “let them eat Vioxx” point of view. But has anyone come up with a real solution?
To know a real answer when we see it, we must define the question clearly. On the basis of our research, our experience, and a broad review of the literature, we believe that a true health-care solution would meet eight criteria.
1. Consistent High Quality. A large and growing body of evidence suggests that health care in the United States could be far more effective than it is now. One data point to consider: In December 2004, the not-for-profit Institute for Healthcare Improvement, based in Cambridge, Mass., launched the “100,000 Lives Campaign”; its goal was to save those lives in U.S. hospitals through improved care. By June 2006 it had already exceeded that goal by 20 percent. That this campaign succeeded so quickly is impressive, but the very swiftness of that achievement also shows how pervasive care of uneven quality is, and how little attention it has received until recently.
2. Lower Cost. In many cases, this point follows from the first. Higher-quality care is often inherently less expensive; providers improve their quality by honing their organizational processes to become more efficient and effective, to avoid error, and to do things right the first time. We’ve seen this happen in branches of the health industry that compete directly for the consumer dollar, such as plastic surgery and laser vision correction, where a proliferation of products and providers over the past 15 years has been accompanied by provably higher quality and dropping prices. Such examples make it clear that health care could not only slow its inflation rate but actually drop its costs substantially.
3. Available to All. For ethical, political, systemic, and business reasons, health care must be universal: available to everyone. There are many ways to enable this — for example, by extending Medicare universally, establishing government-funded medical savings accounts and catastrophic health plans for the working uninsured, creating combinations of tax credits and vouchers, or some other approach. And universal coverage need not mean a single-payer system or more government control.
4. Single Model. For many of the same reasons, it will not work to have one system for the well-off while everyone else gets what health-care futurist Ian Morrison calls “the Department of Motor Vehicles with stethoscopes.” The market can be segmented, as most markets are, but one way or another, every provider in the system must compete to offer the best product at the best price.
