Strategies for Reining In Medicare Spending Through Delivery System Reforms: Assessing the Evidence and Opportunities
Many health reformers
describe the rapid growth of health care spending in general, and Medicare
spending in particular, as a serious threat to the nation’s economic health. In
fact, the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be depleted in 2017, in
the absence of higher revenues, spending reductions or both.
This report commissioned by the Kaiser Family Foundation assesses the potential
for various proposed reforms to strengthen Medicare’s long-term fiscal outlook.
Looking beyond provider payment reductions, the report examines the evidence to
assess leading strategies under consideration to improve both quality of
patient care and efficiency within Medicare as well as the overall health-care
system.
The report considers the evidence and lessons learned from demonstrations and
other studies on each of these concepts in order to assess the extent to which
proposed reforms are likely to achieve savings in the short or long term and
change providers’ practices in ways that both reduce beneficiaries’ need for
expensive services and reduce unnecessary procedures and inefficiencies.
The report was authored by Randall Brown of Mathematica Policy Research.
