A recent report on waste in health care has pointed to the fact of unnecessary waste in this field, accounting for nearly $850,000,000 due to superfluous care, unsystematic paperwork, and deceit. A sizable reduction in these costs would impact the cost of medical and health insurance. The report highlighted some of the areas that required attention along with remedies to reduce wasteful expenditure in the field of health care.
Duplicate paperwork can be avoided leading to more efficiency by adopting a system of electronic record keeping. Besides multiplicity of reports it also does away with repetitive tests by sharing of information between physicians and other specialists.
Medicare scams and referral commissions account for one quarter of the cost of health care waste. Effective policing and enactment of tougher laws would help curb this menace.
Over-zealous doctors who prescribe excessive antibiotics and unnecessary tests in order to safeguard against malpractice suits can burden the health care system with costs of up to $300 billion per year. Introduction of reforms in this area to curtail the designs of shrewd lawyers would go a long way in cutting costs.
Promote a culture of preventive therapy that would help detect ailments at an early stage, thereby cutting huge costs in treatment of chronic conditions. This alone would result in a saving of almost $50 billion yearly.
Provision and insistence of better training for Doctors and associated professionals would reduce the incidence of mistakes which cost insurers more in repetitive procedures.
These suggestions should necessarily be part of any discussion on reforms in the health care sector.