Costliest 1 Percent Of Patients Account For 21 Percent Of U.S. Health Spending – The Washington Post

2013

So you want to make health care affordable, you want lower premiums, you want an efficient health care system with the best use of resources and the best quality of health care? Reform health care … not just health insurance!

Somebody paid for all the health care described below, much of it unnecessary. We see a lack of any coordination and we see a lack of flexibility in receiving care and ancillary services. Those are the challenges we now face and why coordination of care, integrated information systems and better management of care are so important, especially as we expand the number of Americans with the financial means to obtain more health care.

This is why health insurance is expensive, not because of insurance company salaries and profit.

Costliest 1 Percent Of Patients Account For 21 Percent Of U.S. Health Spending – The Washington Post.

A 58-year-old Maryland woman breaks her ankle, develops a blood clot and, unable to find a doctor to monitor her blood-thinning drug, winds up in an emergency room 30 times in six months.

A 55-year-old Mississippi man with severe hypertension and kidney disease is repeatedly hospitalized for worsening heart and kidney failure; doctors don't know that his utilities have been disconnected, leaving him without air conditioning or a refrigerator in the sweltering summer heat.

A 42-year-old morbidly obese woman with severe cardiovascular problems and bipolar disorder spends more than 300 days in a Michigan hospital and nursing home because she can't afford a special bed or arrange services that would enable her to live at home.

These patients are among the 1 percent whose ranks no one wants to join: the costly cohort battling multiple chronic illnesses who consumed 21 percent of the nearly $1.3 trillion Americans spent on health care in 2010, at a cost of nearly $88,000 per person. Five percent of patients accounted for 50 percent of all health-care expenditures. By contrast, the bottom 50 percent of patients accounted for just 2.8 percent of spending that year, according to a recent report by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.