Containing health care costs

[Gregory]

Conceptually, total health care costs can be contained or decreased only by some combination of the following strategies:

Decreasing use of health care services
Decreasing reimbursement for services that are used
Decreasing overhead (payor, provider, or both)

Some strategies adversely affect access to care or outcomes; others may improve care. Evaluating different strategies is difficult, partly because accurately measuring patient-centered health outcomes (eg, morbidity, mortality, or quality-adjusted life years [QALY]) tends to be expensive and require large numbers of patients and long follow-up periods. As a result, most measurements used to assess health care quality reflect processes (how care was delivered) rather than outcome. How well these process measurements predict ultimate health outcomes is not always clear.
(See also Overview of Health Care Financing.)