Aug 7
2015
The Treatment of Good News about the U.S. Healthcare System
Guest post by Ken Perez, vice president of healthcare policy, Omnicell.
Tracy Morgan, the “30 Rock” and “Saturday Night Live” star, once said, “Bad news travels at the speed of light; good news travels like molasses.” Such is the case with respect to the cost and clinical performance of the U.S. healthcare system.
Steven Brill, founder of Court TV and the American Lawyer, famously pilloried America’s healthcare system in “Bitter Pill: How outrageous pricing and egregious profits are destroying our healthcare,” the cover article in the March 4, 2013 issue of Time and the longest in the history of the magazine. Brill wrote, “In the U.S. people spend almost 20 percent of the gross domestic product on health care, compared with about half that in most developed countries. Yet in every measurable way, the results our health care system produces are no better and often worse than the outcomes in those countries.” In a subsequent article in the Jan. 19, 2015 issue of Time, Brill went on to describe the U.S. as having “a broken-down jalopy of a health care system.”
Brill’s “Bitter Pill” article received generous coverage by CBS, the Commonwealth Club, the Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and even Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.”
The July 28, 2015 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) included an article, “Mortality, Hospitalizations, and Expenditures for the Medicare Population Aged 65 Years or Older, 1999-2013,” that shared the findings of a study of over 68 million Medicare fee-for-service and Medicare Advantage beneficiaries by H.M. Krumholz, et al.
This lengthy, detailed, heavily footnoted, and carefully written study reported the following encouraging findings: