Dive Brief:
- Despite spending $2.7 trillion per year on healthcare, the U.S. isn't keeping up with the rest of the developed world when it comes to health outcomes, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
- Life expectancy in the U.S. is growing, but U.S. residents still aren't living as long as residents of Western Europe or Japan.
- Meanwhile, the U.S. has seen an increase in professional services, drugs, devices and administrative costs since 2000; expert suggest that a value-based model would squeeze better performance of out of the money being spent.
Dive Insight:
When healthcare discussions turn to the problem of how to get more for our money, someone always brings up the notion of value-based healthcare payment. The problem with that is that we haven't fully articulated how to create a value-based system, though there are many experiments under way. The U.S. is going to have to do much, much more than create value-based payment bundles for a few high-priced services before we shift the needle on overall healthcare outcomes. And that, unfortunately, is likely to take a very long time.