I participated in a roundtable of distinguished health care experts convened by The Institute of Medicine to discuss cutting the health care bill in America by 10% or over 400 billion dollars by 2018. Read on to see what we discussed and concluded.
Harvard researchers, employee benefits administrators, physicians, health plan executives, and improvement experts gathered at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington on Dec. 15 and 16th to discuss the nation's health care cost crisis. We reviewed reams of data that had been presented over three workshops the IOM hosted in 2009. At the September workshop I presented data from the work of the Healthcare Value Leaders Network.
The purpose of the meeting was to obtain expert opinion in addition to literature review to better understand how likely it is the nation could actually reduce health care expenses by 400 billion dollars over 10 years. I believe we can do better than this and have said as much on this blog and in peer reviewed journal articles we have published. At the end of the day most of us felt 10 % was quite possible and we were able to categorize where we thought we could obtain it. The IOM will be posting comments on this work in the next few days www.iom.edu but the following is a compendium of what we were working off of and what we felt was possible. I should make it clear to the readers this does not represent any official opinion of the IOM or even a consensus of the roundtable members. It really is just the beginning of the very tough discussions we are going to need to have in this country if we are are really going to bend the cost curve.
The first document lists the members of the roundtable.The second document describes three scenarios written by the IOM's Pierre Yong M.D. based on 2009 workshop presentations with dollar figures attached to each strategy for cost improvement based on the presenters data or experience. Each strategy is described in more detail under the scenario. Finally, at the end of the document is the preliminary conclusion of the roundtable which is summarized by me on what the priorities should be to reduce cost and estimates of what cost improvement could be obtained.
Tell me what you think.
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