Overhauling America’s Healthcare Machine: Stop the Bleeding and Save Trillions

15. Where Does the Money Come From?

“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.”

—Everett Dirksen

Based upon the financial estimates made in previous chapters, the proposed overhaul of the healthcare machine that we have described can be expected to generate total annual savings of just over $572 billion. These are summarized in Table 15.1. We have not balanced these savings with some additional costs that we know will be incurred by the newly revised system—partly because estimates of those costs are best done by organizations with enough resources to make them meaningful (for example, the Congressional Budget Office), and partly because many of those costs represent investments rather than consumption. Examples ...