Health Affairs May 8, 2019
Although there is strong public sentiment that health care costs in the United States are too high and are growing at an unsustainable rate, there is little agreement about how to address the problem. One of the major contributing factors to rising health care costs is unnecessary and wasteful spending, as evidenced by the significant variation in the amount that hospitals and physicians are paid by private insurers for essentially the same service. These payment variations reveal waste, which is an important driver of spending in health care markets across the US.
A Review Of The Evidence On Payment Variation
In a 2011 Health Affairs article, Uwe Reinhardt noted that the actual amounts paid by a large New...