Health Care Cost Containment and Medical Innovation

An iconoclastic view of health cost containment.

Calls for medical care cost containment are all around us. Although the evidence that costs are too high is strong, the evidence that they are rising too quickly is much weaker. The principal cause of increasing costs appears to be the increased capabilities of medicine; the scant evidence available suggests that to date the public has wanted to pay for most of these capabilities. Effective glo...

Health care innovation in an era of cost containment.

Controlling Health Care Costs through Commercial Insurance

Commercial insurance companies' have the market incentives and the ability to take on a new role as controllers of rising health care costs. This Note will discuss the market for insurer-directed cost containment, the types of cost control alternatives that could be utilized and the legal restraints on insurer innovation. The analysis of the legal setting for insurer innovation in cost control ...

Innovation in patient-centered care: lessons from a qualitative study of innovative health care organizations in Washington State

BACKGROUND Growing interest in the promise of patient-centered care has led to numerous health care innovations, including the patient-centered medical home, shared decision-making, and payment reforms. How best to vet and adopt innovations is an open question. Washington State has been a leader in health care reform and is a rich laboratory for patient-centered innovations. We sought to unders...

An analysis of structural incentives in the Arizona Health Care Cost-Containment System

This article analyzes the financial structures of the prevailing public and private health insurance mechanisms. Based on this analysis, it was concluded that the financial structures of health insurance mechanisms are deficient in that they neither produce efficiency in the consumption of health services, nor generate efficiency in the production of health services. On the other hand, closed-e...