Genevieve Kanter<\/a>, Ph.D., a public policy professor at USC, highlighted the system\u2019s design \u2014 where health care is managed by multiple insurers and government programs \u2014 as a major contributor to waste. She said administrative complexity, such as different rules and payment models, leads to extra costs that don\u2019t help patients.<\/p>\n\u201cThis is not going to be easy to just become efficient,\u201d Kanter said, adding that even efforts to reduce waste will only go so far unless the larger system changes.<\/p>\n
Lanhee Chen, PhD., who served in senior roles in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the George W. Bush administration and has advised politicians such as Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, said that many policymakers lack the expertise to tackle health care\u2019s complex issues.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s a fatigue around health care,\u201d said Chen, the David and Diane Steffy Fellow, Hoover Institution at Stanford University. \u201cIf you talk to a lot of members of Congress, or even senior players in the administration, they\u2019ll tell you, \u2018I just want this off my plate. I don\u2019t want to deal with it.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Panelists also offered guidance for journalists covering health care, encouraging them to look beyond surface-level stories. They recommended investigating whether hospitals have fulfilled their promises following mergers and examining how brokers are paid to enroll seniors in Medicare Advantage plans.<\/p>\n
Panelists agreed that while politicians focus on rooting out waste, the real challenge is changing the system\u2019s incentives \u2014 which currently reward providing\u00a0 more care rather than keeping people healthy. Until those incentives shift, they warned, high spending and poor results will persist.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Emily Woodruff is a health reporter at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Panelist Genevieve Kanter, Ph.D., speaks at HJ25. Photo by Zachary Linhares Finding true efficiencies in the U.S. health…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":33977,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[210,1141,1142,21626,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-33976","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-care","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-care","10":"tag-healthcare","11":"tag-hj25","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114786553224422434","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}