Health care spending in the United States reached $3.2 trillion in 2013, which accounted for 17% of U.S. GDP. This is almost twice as much as the OECD average of 9%, yet health outcomes in the U.S. are not twice as good as in these other countries. In fact, many outcomes are worse. For example, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. is 78.8 years, which falls short of the OECD average of 80.5 years.
Research: Higher U.S. Physician Spending Doesn’t Lead to Better Patient Outcomes
There’s considerable waste in the system.
March 13, 2017
Summary.
Health care spending in the U.S. reached $3.2 trillion in 2013, which accounted for 17% of U.S. GDP. This is almost twice as much as the OECD average of 9%, yet health outcomes in the U.S. are not twice as good as in these other countries. Many studies have documented enormous geographic variation in spending within the U.S., while finding no clear relationship with quality of care and health outcomes. Yet surprisingly few studies have attempted to analyze how health care spending patterns vary across individual doctors, and more important, whether the practice patterns of individual doctors relate to their patients’ outcomes. A new study of Medicare hospitalizations in JAMA Internal Medicine found that individual physicians vary substantially in their health care spending, even within the same hospital, and that greater spending does not lead to improvement in patient outcomes.