Dear Editor:
In an article on October 4th, Noam N. Levey wrote about how errors and excess care bring about significant costs to the Medicare and Medicaid programs. I agree that in order to improve the condition of our healthcare system, the true sources of excess spending need to be identified before any helpful changes, monetary or systemic, can occur.
What people don’t understand is that simply cutting back healthcare spending will only diminish the quality and reliability of our healthcare system. Instead we need to eliminate wastefulness and increase efficiency. As a student studying public health, my perspective stems from a preventive health standpoint. Both forms of preventive medicine strategies, inside and outside of the hospital, need to be improved to cut back unnecessary healthcare spending; strategies such as improving coordinated care through renovated electronic records and increasing maternity care coverage could lead to positive change.
Sincerely,
Lacie Wilson
Berkeley, CA
Dear Lacie,
ReplyDeleteI agree with your preventive health standpoint to both eliminate wastefulness and increase efficiency in our current healthcare system.
Additional pathways to improving efficiency include reducing the delivery of services with little or no value. As mentioned in the PH150D lecture "Financing of the US Health Services System," studies show that the practice of defensive medicine demonstrates negligible contribution and increased costs in order to avoid liability/potential lawsuits. Perhaps health care seekers could help with such issues by refusing to pay for certain services. Another possible approach is for practitioners and patients alike to search for alternative methods that are available for treating a given medical condition.
Sincerely,
Sarah Youn
Dear Lacie and Sarah,
ReplyDeleteI find this efficiency debate very interesting, and I too agree with the ways to eliminate waste and improve efficiency in the healthcare system that you both mentioned. An important point that's missing from the article, as well as your responses, however, is the role of public health in reducing the waste of federal dollars. The LA Times article reads, "there is consensus that increased efficiency could offer the best hope for saving the nation's healthcare system," and it is true that we need to focus more on this, but I believe that we could greatly reduce the use of healthcare services, and therefore save money by increasing federal spending for public health departments and services. As you both mentioned, prevention is the key, and public health plays a more important role in preventing disease and poor health than hospitals do. The fact that federal spending on public health is less than 5 percent of total U.S. health spending illustrates the inefficiency that characterizes healthcare in the U.S. By spending more on public health, we could increase the public's knowledge about health risks through education, and we could provide programs and resources for ongoing health assessment and maintenance.
Sincerely,
Sophia Gill