| Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools. |
DOI: 10.1177/155335060501200413 Health Care as a Fixed-Cost Industry: Implications for DeliveryCenter for Health Care Economics, University of Michigan, 1500 E. Medical Center Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0033 Taheri{at}umich.edu
Center for Health Care Economics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Most health-care costs are fixed and sunk. Fixed costs do not vary with the level of patient activity, and once sunk they cannot be easily reversed. We must rethink how we manage the expensive investments in our health care infrastructure, which is where most costs lie. The conventional approaches to rationing care have failed. Physicians have been told to lower the cost of care by rationing resources. This rationing includes reducing the length of patients’ hospital stays but this does not work as intended. A new paradigm advocates making more and better use of existing assets and by pursuing improvements incrementally and at the bedside. Elements include flexing intensive care unit beds, improving operating room efficiencies, and rationalizing health care capacity.
Key Words: health-care costs • operating room bottlenecks • health-care capacity management
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
||||||||||||
 |
|
|
 |
|
Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
