If we in the U.S. ever hope to get a grip on Medicare costs, our society will first have to navigate a steep learning curve. That’s the lesson to take from three recent publications.
Despite the fact that Medicare is expected to represent 18% of the federal budget in 2020 (up from 15% in 2010), and that the Medicare Part A trust fund is projected to have insufficient funds to cover …
Experts, most recently former CMS administrator Don Berwick, tell us that no less than 20% – 30% of medical care is waste. At the very least, waste is harmful to all those who pay for Medicare. But often it’s directly harmful to the patient as well.
I recently saw a friend at a party. Since we’d last seen each other my friend’s spouse had died. (I’m deliberately avoiding gendered pronouns and …
Magic bullets come and go in the world of health policy, but the accountable care organization (ACO) is likely to be a durable reform. Except for group practices like Geisinger, Harvard Vanguard, Kaiser Permanente, systems like the VA, and local communities in which independent practitioners have established cooperative collaborations, health care has been grotesquely uncoordinated in the U.S. ACOs speak to that structural lesion.
Title III of the Patient Protection and …
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