Productivity? In Healthcare?

By JOE FLOWER Obamacare is built on the assumption that healthcare can be more productive, that we can squeeze more health per dollar out to the system that is built to give it to us. Practically everything I write is based on the same idea — big time. I believe we could do healthcare better for half the money we pour into it now. There is a widely-cited theory that this is fundamentally impossible, popularized by William Baumol, a New York University economist, in a 2012 book, The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t. Baumol trades on the idea that healthcare is mostly the individual labor of highly trained professionals (doctors, nurses, and technicians) whose labor cannot simply be baked into machines and software. So we can’t expect healthcare to become any more productive, especially as healthcare keeps getting more complex. We can’t both be right. What’s the daylight between these two radically different points of view? I believe that the Baumol argument assumes many things that are simply not true. These include: o  We are using doctors and other personnel at their highest and best use (when in fact we waste masses of clinician time on documentation and other processes that do not add value at all, let alone value that only they could add) o  The goal against which productivity should be measured is provision of healthcare processes, such as how efficiently one can do a gall bladder removal or an uncomplicated birth (as agains...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: THCB Uncategorized Source Type: blogs