Small Ideas for Saving Big Health Care Dollars

Many proposals for tackling the health care cost problem have been offered. But for decades, the health policy process has been in a state of perpetual gridlock. Cost-reduction proposals that require legislation will clearly be difficult to implement. 

In this paper, the authors have reversed the policy perspective and tackled the cost problem by thinking small. That is, rather than focusing on large, controversial ideas for reducing health care expenditures, they explored relatively focused approaches that would, for any particular idea, generate modest cost savings. 

"The ideas represent a small sample of all possible cost-saving ideas and therefore may not necessarily be those that are the most promising or most feasible. However, this list of small ideas may serve as proof of concept of the types of initiatives that are possible."