News Release
Cost Savings Possible from Reducing Use of Low-Value Health Services
Aug 29, 2016
Published in: JAMA Internal Medicine, 2016
Posted on RAND.org on September 14, 2016
More than $750 billion of US health care spending annually represents waste, including approximately $200 billion in overtreatment. Reducing overuse could improve quality and access while reducing spending and has been championed by clinicians through the Choosing Wisely initiative, as well as payers and policymakers. Indirect assessments of waste based on geographic spending variation reveal the scale of the problem, but cannot concretely inform methods of improvement. Direct assessments of low-value care have thus far focused on Medicare only, a limited set of measures, or a specific geographic area. We assessed low-value health care and spending in a large, national, commercially insured population.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation External publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.