Health Care’s Infectious Losses

This came in recently from Jonathan Ater, who served as vice-chair of the Oregon Health Fund Board:

The following op-ed from the New York Times makes the same point that the Oregon Health Fund Board made: the problem with health care is not simply a financial problem, it is a performance problem.

One of the most curious things to me is that the private sector – insurance and big providers – have not been able to get their arms around this performance problem. No other industry could survive with the kind of random variability and waste that characterizes US health care.

Here’s an excerpt from that op-ed by Paul O’Neill, who was secretary of the Treasury from 2001 to 2002:

Health care reform seems to be on the way, whether we want it or not. So I have been asking questions about the various proposals. Here is a sampling.

• Which of the reform proposals will eliminate the millions of infections acquired at hospitals every year?
• Which of the proposals will eliminate the annual toll of 300 million medication errors?
• Which of the proposals will eliminate pneumonia caused by ventilators?
• Which of the proposals will eliminate falls that injure hospital patients?
• Which of the proposals will capture even a fraction of the roughly $1 trillion of annual “waste” that is associated with the kinds of process failures that these questions imply?

So far, the answer to each question is “none.”

You can read the entire editorial here.