The first issue is how the US performance compared with that of the five other countries on a variety of measures.
The US was best or next to the best of all the countries at: diabetes process of care, hypertension process of care, waiting times to see specialists, and waiting times for elective surgery.
The US was worst or next to worst at: medical errors, providing patients with regular doctors, waiting for appointments with regular doctors, providing care after hours, access problems due to cost, and out of pocket expenses.
As reported by the Washington Post , Dr. Carolyn Clancy, Director of the US Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ), commented, "The findings here reinforce how difficult it is coordinating care .... That's the next frontier."
What Dr. Clancy seems to have been implying, in her understated way, was that these results show that the US had difficulty providing continuous, comprehensive, and coordinated care, the sort of care which is generally provided by primary care and generalist physicians.
Thus this pattern corresponds to the US priority on specialized, high-technology, invasive care, while primary care/ generalist care has been taken for granted. Furthermore, as US costs have continued to rise, most of the pressure to cut costs has been applied to primary/ generalist care. As a consequence, primary care and generalist physicians must put up with reimbursement that barely keeps up with inflation, while the costs of running a practice rise much faster; with growing mounds of paperwork and bureaucratic intrusions, while, like Rodney Dangerfield, they get no respect. (See our previous posts on the worsening plight of primary care, for example, here, and our wooden-headed system of reimbursement, here.)
An even more striking issue is the contrast between how much the US spends and the performance of its health care system compared to that other countries. The US spends far more on the health care than the other countries, surveyed, 14.6% of gross domestic product versus 10.9% for Germany, the next biggest spender. Yet, as noted above the US was more often at the bottom than the top of the survey ratings. Thus, the US gets the least bang for the buck of any of the six countries. So, as the Washington Post reported, the first author of the Health Affairs study said, "What's striking is that we clearly are a world leader in how much we spend on health care. We should be expecting to be the best. Clearly, we should be doing better."
No hypothesis to explain this contrast appeared in the Health Affairs article, or in the comments of the experts quoted by the Wahington Post.
At best, the Post quoted Lucian Leape, of the Harvard School of Public Health, opined, "This provides confirming evidence for what more and more health policy thinkers have been saying. The American health care system is quietly imploding, and it's about time we did something about it." Why the system is imploding, and what should be done about it were apparently left unsaid.
I submit that the missing link here are some perennial topics on Health Care Renewal: the domination of health care by large, increasingly bureaucratic organizations, lead too often by the ill-informed, the conflicted, and at times the frankly corrupt.
What else explains how we can spend more than other countries, yet get less access, impose higher costs on patients, and provide by most measures, poorer quality care?
This really is something for those health policy thinkers to think about.
Post Title → The US Gets Less Bang for its Buck: The Health Affairs Six-Country Survey
