A lot has changed since family physicians
made house calls and pharmacies were family-owned businesses
with soda fountains, here are the facts that Americans are
now facing:
Health care already eats up 15.3 percent
of our GDP at $2.2 trillion a year and that number is projected
to reach $4 trillion by 2016.
140 million ineligible prescriptions
are written every year.
There are 1.5 trillion claims each year
and a full 30 percent of those claims have errors while
15 percent get lost.
25% of claims are paper-based and it costs
$20-25 manually to process them.
35% of our health care dollars are spent
on treatments that do not improve our health or are completely
redundant.
Roughly the 20 % of the $20 trillion
we spend in health care goes to paperwork and red tape.
According to the Commonwealth Fund Commission,
the US is experiencing 100,000 to 150,000 preventable deaths
on an annual basis and spending $100 billion per year needlessly.
Every year, 20 million unnecessary antibiotics
prescriptions are given out, 7.5 million unnecessary medical
or surgical procedures are performed and 8.9 million unnecessary
hospitalizations occur.
Every year some $400-500 billion is wasted
on rework and error.
At a Kaiser Permanente clinic in Sacramento,
they have been able to reduce an average 55 days wait to
one day by offering "open access" or "same day scheduling."
According to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, only 7 percent of diabetes patients get
all the treatment they need.
An estimated 100,000 surgical procedures
were performed through robotics in 2007, from kidney transplants
to prostate removals.
We now have 100 million people with chronic
conditions in this country and we can expect that number
to reach 134 million by 2020.
Today for many physicians, 50 percent
of their patient load is price-controlled by a single payer—Medicare
or Medicaid, and the other half by private health plans.
