JAMA: Target Wasteful Spending, Not Care

While striving to provide the most innovative and valuable care to patients is the overarching goal of healthcare, the costs associated with this care are astronomical. Several strategies have been implemented into practice to curb these high expenditures, yet current healthcare costs are nearly 18 percent of the gross domestic product. Donald M. Berwick, MD, and Andrew D. Hackbarth, MPhil, say cut waste, not care.

Berwick, former president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and Hackbarth, of RAND in Santa Monica, Calif., put forth a special communication that was published online March 14 in the Journal of the American Medical Association to provide strategies and ideas on how to shrink healthcare-related costs into a sustainable range.

Berwick and Hackbarth said that healthcare expenditures are so high that they may be intruding into other government programs and are "undermining" the competition of U.S. industry...