Research from the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation tracks how well the U.S. healthcare system performs compared to similar countries.
Medical costs in the U.S. impact access to healthcare more than in countries with comparable wealth and populations, according to a new analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation and Peterson Center on Healthcare.
In “Measuring the Quality of Healthcare in the U.S.,” Gary Claxton, Cynthia Cox, Selena Gonzales, Rabah Kamal and Larry Levitt compile an overall picture of healthcare quality in the U.S.,
using the best available data from numerous sources on health outcomes, quality of care and access to services.
“We have good data on how much we are spending on healthcare in the U.S., but know much less about what outcomes we are getting in return for that spending, and how much those outcomes are influenced by the healthcare system itself,” according to a Kaiser Family Foundation news release on the analysis.
The amount individual consumers and the country as a whole spend on healthcare, and health insurance to offset the costs, is just one of the reasons caring about healthcare quality in the U.S. is important, according to the analysis.
“These costs have risen much more rapidly over time than those of other sectors of the economy. Financing the rising cost of healthcare is challenging, requiring difficult tradeoffs for families and governments, and those paying the bills quite legitimately want to know if they are getting good value for their money,” it states.
The costs of healthcare are more well-understood than measuring the effectiveness and quality of the healthcare people receive, according to the analysis.
“There is fairly broad agreement on how to measure the financial resources spent on healthcare at the national level, and consistent measurements are routinely reported by governments, both in the U.S. and in many other nations, as part of efforts to measure economic output. The data are not perfect, but we have a very good sense of how much we are spending in aggregate for hospitals, physicians, prescriptions, and other services; who is spending it; and how it all is changing overtime. And the statistics clearly show that the U.S. spends far more on healthcare than any other country per person and as a share of the economy.”
The situation is much less clear when it comes to measuring the effectiveness and quality of the healthcare people receive, in part because the healthcare system is so vast and there is no clear way to add up the benefits, according to the analysis.
“Several recent reports addressing quality measurement have emphasized the burdens associated with reporting a large number of current measures and the sometimes inconsistent requirements for similar measures,” it states.
Access to Care
One of the key areas where the U.S. differs from comparable countries is the impact of costs on access to care.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 7 percent of adults reported cost-related access barriers in 2000 and 11 percent reported the same in 2009 as the Great Recession occurred. Nine percent of adults reported cost-related access barriers in 2013 as the economy improved.
However the analysts also report, based on an international surveys by The Commonwealth Fund, that in 2013 the U.S. had the highest rates of cost-related access to care problems among comparable countries. Thirty-seven percent of consumers in the U.S. reported cost-related problems compared to 4 percent in the United Kingdom and 22 percent in the Netherlands, according to the analysts.
Additional findings on access to care include:
The recession had more of an influence on consumers in worse health, with lower incomes or no health insurance. “Among people whose self-reported health status was fair or poor, 22 percent reported delaying or forgoing medical care due to cost in 2013, but had recently peaked at 25 percent in 2009.”
Poor or low-income consumers “were more likely to report cost-related access barriers during the recession (increasing from 13 percent in 1998 to 17 percent in 2009, and then declining to 14 percent in 2013). The uninsured are most likely to report cost barriers, with 31 percent delaying or forgoing care in 2013 – a much higher rate than in 1998, when 24 percent of the uninsured reported cost-related access barriers.”
Source: http://www.acainternational.org
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