The government could save $540 billion in healthcare costs over the next 10 years if programs and techniques that have improved healthcare quality and slowed the growth of medical spending are applied more broadly.
A research paper from UnitedHealth Group’s new Center for Health Reform and Modernization offers a range of savings options based on data and results from a selection of UnitedHealth Group programs.
According to officials, the report is being shared with Congress and senior administration members. It is intended as a contribution to the national health reform debate and is not a complete inventory of UnitedHealth's ideas for cost savings and quality improvement.
“Our data and experience show that – working in partnership with physicians, hospitals and other care providers – in practice it is possible to get more value out of healthcare spending so as to fund increased access to high quality care,” said UnitedHealth Group Executive Vice President Simon Stevens, who directs the new center. “This report provides concrete examples of how we can modernize our healthcare system in a thoughtful and sustainable way, partly through proven programs that are already working.”
The report focuses on possible savings in future federal spending that could help fund healthcare reform legislation. Most of the estimates derive from applying more broadly the approaches UnitedHealth Group has found to work either in its commercially-insured or Medicare programs.
The 15 cost-containment options are in four categories: giving beneficiaries incentives to use high-quality care providers, reducing avoidable and inappropriate care, supporting and giving physicians incentive to deliver high-quality appropriate care and applying evidence-based standards to reimbursement policies.
The report projects that over the next 10 years approximately $55 billion could be saved by reducing seniors’ avoidable readmissions to hospitals partly by providing ‘transitional care’ support. Also, $37 billion could be saved through voluntary programs that help seniors choose to receive care from high quality and efficient care providers. And $166 billion could be saved by reducing the need for people living in nursing homes to be admitted to a hospital.
Cost containment options could be employed in a wide range of methods, from voluntary uptake to the use of financial or non-financial incentives for beneficiaries and care providers.