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But the Health Affairs study, "Most Americans have good health, little unmet need and few health care expenses," shows just how important the healthy people who spend very little on health care are. Slice the data a different way, and the bottom half of spenders all together rack up only about 3 percent of overall health care spending — a pattern that hasn't budged for decades. A conservative vision of health care would have people take more responsibility for their own health care costs, but the graph above presents policy challenges as well, because it suggests that solution wouldn't just be a matter of making people at all levels smarter shoppers. (Washington Post illustration; iSTOCKPHOTOS)Here's a simple reason crafting health policy is so devilishly hard: Most Americans are pretty healthy and a few are really sick. The political debate over health care often focuses on how a new system will meet the needs of the sick: Will cancer patients or people with diabetes access and afford care when they need it?




The commission has "chosen to ignore the exorbitant insurance and health care costs in rural areas of Colorado … causing our costs to skyrocket." APRIL 2: Despite — or perhaps because of — Colorado mountain dwellers' love of hiking, skiing, bicycling and all things physical, health care costs are stubbornly stuck far above average. Before Obamacare, "No one paid attention to what things cost," Colorado Insurance Commissioner Marguerite Salazar said. While transparency generally is good, in this case it illuminated the differences in health costs between metro Denver and the mountain resorts. Last year, when United Health Care and Humana dropped out of the individual plan market, it left 20,000 Coloradans scrambling for an alternative.

This is Americans' best chance to improve their health care

Mark Zitter is chair of the Zetema Project, a diverse group of health care leaders informing the national health care conversation through expert debate. So we have the happy situation — rare in health care — where informed patients want better care that actually costs less. But in a political environment where major progress seems hard to come by, this may be our best near-term shot to improve U.S. health care. The fundamental problem is simple: Americans want to consume more health care than we collectively want to pay for. But there is one exception to this rule, one place where it's possible to deliver better health care, make patients more satisfied, and save money: Care at the end of life.


collected by :Lucy William

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