Dr. Atul Gawande on Health Care Inflation

By John Ballard

Remember The Cost Conundrum, that article in the New Yorker that became mandatory reading in Washington as part of the health care debate? That was Atul Gawande talking.
The same Dr. Gawande gave the commencement address at Stanford School of Medicine last week. Here is part of what he said. Again.

...Diagnosis and treatment of most conditions require complex steps and considerations, and often multiple people and technologies. The result is that more than forty per cent of patients with common conditions like coronary artery disease, stroke, or asthma receive incomplete or inappropriate care in our communities. And the country is also struggling mightily with the costs. By the end of the decade, at the present rate of cost growth, the price of a family insurance plan will rise to $27,000. Health care will go from ten per cent to seventeen per cent of labor costs for business, and workers� wages will have to fall. State budgets will have to double to maintain current health programs. And then there is the frightening federal debt we will face. By 2025, we will owe more money than our economy produces. One side says war spending is the problem, the other says it�s the economic bailout plan. But take both away and you�ve made almost no difference. Our deficit problem�far and away�is the soaring and seemingly unstoppable cost of health care.

Let me repeat that.

Our deficit problem�far and away�
is the soaring and seemingly unstoppable cost of health care.

If the rising costs of health care fail to get controlled, the costs of health care will outdistance GDP by 2025.
Inflation, it's called.
Health care inflation.

Dr. Gawande said a lot of other good stuff as well. He's basically an optimist. But his optimism is not immune to economic realities.The delivery of health care has been left to free enterprise and politics for too long. The result has been an economic train wreck. Corrective action is long overdue.