If other countries can have lower health care costs and better outcomes, why can't the U.S.?

Smart Ways to Keep the Brake on Health-Care Costs

By Peter Orszag, Bloomberg - Aug 1, 2012

The rising cost of health care in the U.S. has been slowing over the past few years, driven both by weakness in the general economy and by some changes in the way medical services are provided. The crucial question now is, how can we make sure that progress continues?

Surprisingly, for all the recent talk about constraining cost growth, few specific proposals have been made.

That’s why the Center for American Progress should be commended for gathering a group of health-care experts and putting forward more than 10 specific proposals. (Disclosure: I was part of the group, which included a broad array of doctors and other medical practitioners and academics.) The proposals, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, aim to reduce costs wherever possible by curtailing care that is unnecessary and reducing the prices of procedures people need.

First, consider how drastic the recent deceleration in health-care costs has been. A common way to evaluate the growth in spending for Medicare is to compare the increase per beneficiary to income per capita. Over the past 30 years, this excess cost growth for Medicare has averaged about 2 percent a year. The goal of many policy proposals, including provisions in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, is to reduce the future excess cost growth to about 1 percent annually.

(More here.)