Health Care Savings

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As Congress begins debating ways to pay for the enormous costs of expanding health insurance coverage (easily $100 billion a year on net), a number of groups are putting forward their own proposals.
 
The UnitedHealth Center for Health Reform & Modernization, this week, put out their list of options for health care savings, ranging from instituting cancer support programs – saving about $5 billion over 10 years – to beginning “integrated medical management programs,” which could save more than $100 billion.
 
According to the report:
 
"Through the 15 options included in this paper we estimate potential federal savings of around $540 billion over the next decade. None of them rely on provider unit price controls as the principal means of generating savings.
 
Our perspective derives from the fact that UnitedHealth Group funds and organizes care for 70 million Americans each year, arranging $115 billion of health care from over 5,000 hospitals and 650,000 physicians nationwide, on behalf of individuals, employers and state and federal governments …
 
Faced with the size of the challenge in slowing national health care cost growth – and the failed history of several previous attempts at doing so – it would be easy to feel despondent about the likelihood of success. But our experience at UnitedHealth Group suggests that slowing cost growth is in fact achievable.
 
Indeed, as our ‘real world’ data suggest, the possibilities for savings are in some categories even larger, and opportunities to get at them even more extensive, than are currently being discussed."
 
As a senator, President Obama offered a number of his own ideas for savings during the campaign and in his budget. The Congressional Budget Office and others have also put together their own lists of options. And CRFB will be publishing ours shortly.