This NY Sunday Times article profiles Kaiser Permanente, the huge health maintenance organization. The article suggests that those who are reviewing ways to revamp the American health care finance system should follow Kaiser’s lead in attempting to increase the quality of care and to spend health dollars more wisely by using technology and incentives tailored to those goals. The entire article is well worth reading, but I was particularly drawn to the following summary of the American system of health care finance, which is spot on:
Health care systems in most industrialized countries are in crises of one form or another. But the American system is characterized by both feast and famine: it leads the world in delivering high-tech medical miracles but leaves 45 million people uninsured. The United States spends more on health care than any other country – $6,167 a person a year – yet it is a laggard among wealthy nations under basic health measures like life expectancy. In a nutshell, America’s health care system, according to many experts, is a nonsystem. “It’s like the worst market system you could devise, just a mess,” said Neelam Sekhri, a health policy specialist at the World Health Organization in Geneva.