Yale Profs Take a Piece-by-Piece Approach to Healthcare

March 4, 2021

MHE Publication, MHE March 2021, Volume 31, Issue 3

Taming U.S. healthcare spending is a huge, daunting task that has met with little success. But some Yale professors are proposing to take a bite-sized approach as a way to change that.

Taming U.S. healthcare spending is a huge, daunting task that has met with little success. But some Yale professors are proposing to take a bite-sized approach as a way to change that.

The “1% Steps for Health Care Reform” project launched by Zach Cooper, Ph.D., and Fiona Scott Morton, Ph.D., promises to offer up “a menu of tangible steps that policymakers can take to lower healthcare costs in the U.S.”

To that end, the project’s website currently has 16 policy briefs posted. Each carries an estimate of the percentage by which proposals in the briefs could reduce healthcare spending.

For example, Cooper and Morton estimate that the changes they propose in their policy brief on out-of-network billing by hospital-based physicians could save$60 billion annually, or 5% of commercial healthcare spending. By their calculation, that works out to 1.67% of total U.S. healthcare spending.

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