We invest billions of dollars each year in medicines, new technologies, doctors, and hospitals — all with the goal of improving health, arguably our most prized commodity. Yet, investments in the U.S. health care system woefully underperform relative to those made in health care in other countries. For instance, the U.S. spends nearly 7–10% more of its national income on health care than other similar countries and yet life expectancy at birth remains, on average, two to three years lower.
Health Care Is an Investment, and the U.S. Should Start Treating It Like One
Investments in the U.S. health care system woefully underperform relative to those made in health care in other countries. One reason is because we invest so much in services that are clearly low-value — i.e., offer little or no clinical benefit relative to the cost — and likely many more where the returns are gray. Investing limited health care dollars into low-value services crowds out our ability to spend on high-value services. Examples of significant investments in low-value care services abound, ranging from expensive imaging for benign medical conditions to routine pre-operative testing before low-risk surgeries like cataract surgery. Many factors contribute to our failure to disinvest from low-value services and invest more heavily in high-value services, such as limited data on the relative value of different health care services and misaligned incentives for health care providers. Fixing this will require coordinated action from many actors — patients, providers, insurers, innovators, and policymakers.