Why Price AND Utilization Matter
I’m-sure-you-know-this-by-now fact-of-the-day: the US leads the world in healthcare costs. As I’ve written previously, a big reason for this is that prices in the US for healthcare services are higher than elsewhere. This was nicely illustrated in a Health Affairs article from 2012. The article looked at how many physicians per capita practiced across six countries, and how much money those physicians made. The income figures were dramatic, especially for subspecialists:
Clearly, it pays to be an orthopedic surgeon in the US. But that does not mean that we can ignore the utilization problem we also have in the US. Far too often, we use far too many medical services. An article in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2012 illustrated this dual problem, of price and utilization:
To control costs, we need to reduce the use of unnecessary services, and stop paying unnecessarily high prices for necessary ones.
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