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September 10, 2008 at 11:15 AM
Congress could improve the quality of health care and possibly reduce the cost by supporting changes already starting to occur in the U.S. health market.
Peter Lee, a health policy analyst at the Pacific Business Group on Health, San Francisco, made that argument Tuesday during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on improving health care quality.
The hearing was part of a series of committee health reform hearings. The next hearing in the series, to focus on strategies for improving health care delivery, is scheduled to take place Sept. 16.
Lee testified during the quality hearing that one way Congress can help improve the climate for health care quality and the private health care and health finance industries is to avoid simply shifting existing costs from one group to another.
A recent study that the PBGH helped sponsor in California “found that almost 40% of the hospital costs born by private payers was not for costs of delivering services to those individuals, but rather it was paid to support the relative underpayment by Medicare and … our Medicaid program,” Lee testified, according to a written version of his remarks.
But Lee said Medicare also should look into the possibility of improving its own program, and conditions for private health plans, by making the following changes:
