The consulting firm McKinsey has released a short report (caution PDF) focused on the healthcare sector costs. Unlike many reports on the subject, this one takes a “market-based view” and subsequently raises some interesting points.
Report takes very much a “high-level” market supply chain perspective on global, healthcare costs today, what is driving the increase and what may ultimately slow growth in costs in the future.
Surprisingly, any discussion of technology is focused on how technology drives up the costs of care (e.g., new, high-cost medications for ever rarer diseases) rather than the potential for technology to decrease costs (telehealth, remote diagnostics, IT). This is the chief failing of the report and it is unfortunate that they missed this opportunity to expand their analysis.
WHO has recently said: “Inequities in access to care and in health outcomes are usually greatest in cases where health is treated as a commodity and care is driven by profitability. The results are predictable: unnecessary tests and procedures, more frequent and longer hospital stays, higher overall costs, and exclusion of people who cannot pay.”
Another View of Healthcare Costs?
No man… just another group of “consultants” with an MBA trying to apply their “analytic tools” to a ground that they do not know at all. I will bet that none of the authors of the report has treat a patient in the last years (in case they have ever done)
Great blog…