In an article in the April 11 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Donald Berwick, former CMS administrator and current senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Andrew Hackbarth, an assistant policy analyst for the RAND Corp., listed six categories of waste they say represent more than 20% of the nation's ever-increasing healthcare expenditures.
The former head of the CMS is speaking out about the importance of reducing waste and reining in healthcare spending. In an article in the April 11 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Donald Berwick, former CMS administrator and current senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Andrew Hackbarth, an assistant policy analyst for the RAND Corp., listed six categories of waste they say represent more than 20% of the nation's ever-increasing healthcare expenditures. Those six areas—fraud and abuse, poor care coordination, failures of care delivery, overtreatment, administrative complexity and overpricing of services—represent enormous opportunities for cost-cutting and improvement, the authors said.
For instance, they argued, overtreatment accounted for an estimated $158 billion to $226 billion in 2011 while the bill for care-coordination failures, such as readmissions, was between $25 billion and $45 billion.
“The savings potentially achieved from systematic, comprehensive and cooperative pursuit of even a fractional reduction in waste are far higher than from more direct and blunter cuts in care and coverage,” they wrote.