Leadership, Strategy, and Innovation: Health Care Collection (8 Items)

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Scoping the Problem

THE U.S. HEALTH CARE SYSTEM is on a dangerous path, with a toxic combination of high costs, uneven quality, frequent errors, and limited access to care. This chapter presents a wide array of indicators that document the range of problems confronting the system. While individual measures can be questioned for their precision or implication, these many disparate kinds of evidence, taken together, lead to the same overwhelming conclusion: the system is broken, and the magnitude of the problem is staggering.

Per capita health care cost in the United States surpasses that of most other developed countries. Despite this, U.S. costs are rising at comparable rates. (See figure 1-1.)¹ Although U.S. costs are high, they have not ...