Bending The Cost Curve In Health Care

Through Canadian and international perspectives, Bending the Cost Curve in Health Care explores the management of growing health costs in an extraordinarily complex arena. The book moves beyond previous debates, agreeing that while efficiencies and better value for money may yet be found, more fundamental reforms to the management and delivery of health services are essential prerequisites to bending the cost curve in the long run. While there is considerable controversy over direction and details of change, there also remains the challenge of getting agreement on the values or principles that would guide the reshaping of the policies, the structures, and the regulatory environment of health care in Canada. Leading experts from around the world representing a range of disciplines and professional backgrounds come together to organize and define the problems faced by policy-makers. Case studies from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, the Nordic countries, and industrialized Asian countries such as Taiwan offer useful reform experiences for provincial governments in Canada. Finally, common Canadian cost factors, such as pharmaceuticals and technology, and paying the health workforce, are explored. This book is the first volume in The Johnson-Shoyama Series on Public Policy, published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, an interdisciplinary centre for research, teaching, and executive training with campuses at the Universities of Regina and Saskatchewan.

Through Canadian and international perspectives, Bending the Cost Curve in Health Care explores the management of growing health costs in an extraordinarily complex arena.

Whatever money is saved through short-term restraint will be lost in panicked spending down the road. That's been the lesson of the past 20 years. The challenge is to bend the cost curve permanently while making the system perform better. What health value do we achieve for what we spend? Improving value for money will require governments, organizations and practitioners to leave their comfort zone of conventional practice.

The Economics of Health and Medical Care is an introduction to population-based health economics as well as the traditional, market-oriented approach to health care economics. The book examines economics through the lens of descriptive, explanatory, and evaluative economics.The Sixth Edition is an extensive revision that refines its approach to evaluative economics by focusing on the tools and methods used to inform decision making, with a particular emphasis on determining alternative approaches to addressing a problem, issue, or decision and comparing the relative benefits and costs of those approaches.

Finance/Accounting/Economics

The need to prioritize efforts to improve the health of the Canadian population to promote the fiscal sustainability of Medicare dates back to at least the Lalonde report (1974), and was proposed in the Kirby commission (2002) and the Romanow commission (2002): M. Lalonde, A new perspective on the health of Canadians. [...] L. Kirby, The Health of Canadians - The Federal Role: Final Report on the State of the Health Care System in Canada (Ottawa: Senate, Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, 2002); R. J. Romanow, Building on Values: The Future of Health Care in Canada: Final Report of the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 2002). [...] The value of the health care costs avoided in the immediate term would be augmented by future health care costs avoided through the prevention of chronic diseases.7 Assessing the effectiveness of the program for preventing chronic diseases is the focus of ongoing work. [...] For program participants in the first year of the program, there are statistically significant reductions of 25 per cent in the number of hospital visits and of 17 per cent in the number of emergency department visits, relative to what we observe in the age- and sex-matched controls. [...] This trend in per participant costs of the program is attributed to changes in the content and delivery of the program reflecting the experience gained through eight years of operating combined with the results of internal program evaluation and external research on the program.

In this short book R.W. Murphy makes the argument that the US healthcare delivery system is irreparably broken as the result of a perfectly inelastic demand curve for healthcare goods and services. In essence, he indicates that Americans will buy the same number of units regardless of price and that is destroying the system. He points to all the retail level cost control initiatives to date as failing to address wholesale pricing pressures. His premise is that underlying wholesale cost increases have hardly been affected at all. Any cost reductions at the retail level resulting from tough utilization management have been no more than temporary "stair step" efforts that get quickly absorbed. He offers both historical perspective and going-forward options for structural change. He refers to the need to make the demand curve more price responsive as an "American Healthcare Imperative" because the inevitable alternative is serious damage to American society in its absence. He indicates that failing to act is no longer an option. R.W. Murphy has been involved in healthcare cost control since 1980. He started his career as a home office underwriter for a major US healthcare insurance company. In 1990 he became a consultant for an international firm and in 1995 formed his owned consulting company. He has been involved in virtually every cost control initiative in the last forty years - and by his own admission, has the scars to prove it. The book has been made deliberately short. It can be read in less than an hour. The author indicates that his intent has been to make Americans think about the necessity for structural change - not give them an actual road map for it. As such, he remains relatively nonpartisan regarding the options. He also is clear that he has spent less time in doing statistical research then using his professional experience to show relationships. He tells the reader to not be caught up in absolute numbers but to instead examine the historical and projected trends.The Introduction has been written under an alias by a professional healthcare administrator in West Palm Beach, Florida. By remaining anonymous, he offers candid opinions with which peer administrators might not agree. His comments come from perspective gained via vast experience on the provider side of the industry. In addition, his politics are significantly right of the author's. As such, his views provide germane counterpoint.As more a red-flag then a how-to book, at its price point it should be read by every person who believes that healthcare policy will be an important differentiating factor in the 2020 US election.