For three months this year, I spent time with some of the sickest and most expensive patients in America — the people who pinball around the health care system, racking up costs that we all indirectly pay through federal and state taxes that go to Medicaid and higher health care bills.
During that time I’ve learned about the great promise of the work, the deep skepticism surrounding it, and why innovations that improve health and save money are so rare. But before we get to those lessons, here’s some background.
As the Government Accountability Office outlined this spring, just five percent of patients nationwide make up 50 percent of health care spending. It’s a group Atul Gawande documented in his seminal New Yorker article, “The Hot Spotters,” in 2011. Since then, we’ve seen some in health care shift their focus toward people who are among the most marginalized in our society.
[For more of this story, written by Dan Gorenstein, go to http://www.reportingonhealth.o...%E2%80%9D-skepticism]
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