What are those costs and how do we cut them? Seventy percent to 75 percent arise from chronic conditions. The majority of those arise from behavior, and almost all of them could be better managed to make cases cheaper by making patients healthier.
Who is spending the money, using the health care resources? This follows a Pareto distribution: 20 percent of the people spend 80 percent of the money; 5 percent of the people spend half the money; 1 percent of the people spend 20 percent of the money.
Who are the 1 percent? Some just got prostate cancer or got hit by a bus. This is their year to be expensive. But a substantial portion of that 1 percent and that 5 percent stay in the same category year after year. So a small percentage of the people use a large percentage of the health care resources by crossing your threshold, showing up in the ED and the hospital over and over with the results of their untreated, unmanaged, untracked chronic disease, addictions and mental problems. And recent studies show that people who have health care coverage (and therefore a regular relationship with a primary care doctor and a health care system) cost the overall system half as much as people without coverage.
Bingo! There’s the treasure, because experience shows that getting aggressive with untreated chronic disease can substantially lower costs. Trying to ignore them is costing us dearly. It’s time to change course.
The Treasure Is There
...Health care’s treasure has been hidden not in some subterranean sealed vault but in plain sight: It is those thousands and millions of cases of poorly treated and untracked chronic disease that flood our EDs every day. We can mine those to reduce health care costs drastically, put our hospitals and health systems on a much more sound economic footing, make people much healthier and, by the way, save the country.
How?
***Six ways. (I really don't care to steal Joe's thunder here...Please visit The Health Care Blog for the whole article.)
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