Return to Sender

Campus Report ^ | July 2, 2009 | Brittany Fortier

[bs9021]

Return to Sender

by: Brittany Fortier, July 02, 2009

At the Cato Institute Conference for Health Care Reform held on June 17, 2009, a panel discussed the importance of reforming the way health care is delivered to patients. “As hard as coverage expansion is, the only way health care is going to become … more predictable, more sustainable, and more cost effective over time is … if there is substantial delivery system reform,” said moderator Susan Dentzer, Editor-in-Chief of Health Affairs.

Shannon Brownlee, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and the Author, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, argued that there is an “enormous amount of waste” in the current system. “The estimate is about twenty to thirty cents of every health care dollar spent is spent on care that is unnecessary and potentially dangerous,” she said. “That’s six hundred to eight hundred billion dollars a year of care that patients don’t need and probably wouldn’t want if they understood the risks involved.”

Brownlee referred to the current system as “top heavy” with more “specialists and light on primary care positions.” The solution, according to Brownlee, is to create a primary care infrastructure. “We basically leave work force policy to the academic medical centers, and so that’s one of the reasons we are heavy on specialists and light on primary care physicians, because they get rewarded for training specialists and the taxpayer picks up the bill,” she said.

Comparing the Obama administration’s health care plan to the 1960’s game show “Supermarket Sweep,” Brownlee expressed her concerns about how quickly Congress could pass the President’s agenda.....

[Palladin]

rationing.