Healthcare Reform and Cost Control

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Will healthcare reform help to cut the growth of Medicare costs? Skeptics are….skeptical, but Austin Frakt has a guest post by Randall Brown, Vice President and Director of Health Research at Mathematica Policy Research, that provides some real-world evidence about proven ways to make Medicare more efficient:

Mary Naylor and Eric Coleman provide clear, rigorous evidence on how to reduce the appallingly high readmission rate (20 percent within 30 days) for Medicare patients discharged from a hospital. Their “transitional care” programs reduce the need for re-admissions by providing much closer attention to patients and their families as patients move from hospital to home. Randomized trials, the most rigorous and credible type of evidence, showed these programs reduced readmission rates by 18 to 35 percent, resulting in reductions in costs that substantially exceed the intervention costs.

….Following the evidence also means establishing a care coordination benefit for a well-defined high risk population of beneficiaries….Randomized trial studies of programs serving beneficiaries with chronic illnesses have found that targeting is critical. For a subgroup of beneficiaries at high risk of near-term hospitalization — which comprises 18 percent of Medicare beneficiaries and 38 percent of Medicare expenditures (those with congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and a hospitalization in the past year) — 4 of the programs in the Medicare Coordinated Care Demonstration had significant and sizable reductions in hospitalizations over the 6-year life of the study.

These two ideas are nowhere near enough to solve Medicare’s funding problems on their own. However, unlike other “curve bending” proposals, which are admittedly speculative, these are proven to work. And in the end, that’s why funding pilot programs and research studies is such an important part of healthcare reform. Not all of the ideas will pan out, but a billion dollars on research will identify which ones work and which ones don’t. Sometimes this means hard choices, but like the programs Brown cites, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes cutting costs actually means providing better care.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate