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Here's the reality of the current healthcare debate and debacle that is taking center stage in Washington - as presented in BusinessWeek's cover story of November 12, 2009 by Catherine Arnst entitled "10 Ways to Cut Health-Care Costs Right Now - Employers and hospitals don't have to wait for Congress to address inefficiencies and waste"

"Seven hundred billion dollars. That's a ballpark estimate of how much money is wasted in the U.S. medical system every single year, according to a new Thomson Reuters (TRI) report. A sum equal to roughly one-third of the nation's total health-care spending is flushed away on unnecessary treatments, redundant tests, fraud, errors, and myriad other monetary sinkholes that do nothing to improve the nation's health. Cut that figure by half, and there would be more than enough money to offer top-notch care to every one of America's 46 million uninsured...

None of the health-care reform bills on the table in Washington do anything meaningful to address that wasted $700 billion. Nor do they call for changes in the underlying flaw that drives much of the waste-the fee-for-service system that pays doctors and hospitals for the amount of medical care delivered rather than for its quality. Under fee-for-service there is no financial incentive for doctors to eliminate waste, since they wouldn't pocket any of the resulting savings. They would just earn less.

By leaving this perverse reward system in place, Congress is virtually guaranteeing that health-care reform legislation, if passed, will do nothing to "bend the curve" of rising health-care costs, as President Barack Obama originally set out to do. Even the few cost-cutting efforts that the bills do include won't go into effect until at least 2013. As a result, U.S. health spending is on track to double over the next 10 years, to $5.2 trillion, about 21% of the gross domestic product...."

Read more here:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_47/b4156034717852.htm

The bottom line is that there is no healthcare reform that has a prayer of working if it does not include the cutting of waste from the system.

If the primary focus doesn't immediately and miraculously shift to cutting waste, the idea of reaching the current healthcare reform objectives (i.e. increasing healthcare coverage while decreasing healthcare costs) is, at best, a fantasy.

- Ed Smith, Publisher
The EHS Letter Manual