In Sunday's session examining “How Will We Bend the Cost Curve – Really?” chaired by Katherine Baicker, Harvard School of Public Health, three experts discussed several  approaches to slowing the growth of health spending insurance through innovations in benefit design, provider payment, and the delivery of care.  In addition to providing an overview of value-based insurance design (VBID), Dana Goldman, University of Southern California described the potential of “money-back guarantees” that refund health plans and patients for treatments that do not work and the use of fixed licensing fees for on-going treatments such as medications.  Arnold Millstein, Stanford University, and the Pacific Business Group on Health underscored the need to raise health care productivity by the 2.5 percentage points in order to control costs.   He described how achieving this goal is a several-step process requiring improvements in our ability to measure and compare value of health care services, increasing provider and patient sensitivity to value, re-engineering clinical processes, and developing rapid processes for on-going improvements in value.  And finally, Lewis Sandy drew on several initiatives at United Healthcare to illustrate how modernizing the infrastructure of the health “ecosystem” and an emphasis on population health can reduce cost growth for both public and private payers.

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