What is your evaluation of the effectiveness of the U.S. health care system in the context of delivery, finance, management, and/or sustainability? What are the issues that prompted a need for health care reform? Support your answer with a credible data reference. Do not use a reference already used by another student. Shortell, Gillies, & Wu (2010) states that the United States has the most expensive healthcare system in the world (16 percent of GDP), but their health status indicators are only average at best when compared with the less costly health systems of other countries. Therefore, there is particularly intense pressure to provide more cost-effective delivery systems in the US, as it attempts to expand health insurance coverage and address serious cost and quality issues (Shortell, Gillies, & Wu, 2010). The implementation of HMOs and PPOs have failed to decrease costs as desired, so further reform is required.
According to Shortell, Gillies, & Wu (2010), the main issues prompting a need for healthcare delivery reform are population aging, rapidly increasing costs of healthcare and most importantly the growing burden of chronic disease. In the United States, nearly three-quarters of Americans over the age of 65 suffer from a chronic illness and half of them have more than one, which account for 75 percent of the $2.4 trillion of healthcare expenditures (Shortell, Gillies, & Wu, 2010).
Shortell, Gillies, & Wu (2010) discuss three important healthcare delivery innovations which show a lot of potential for providing more cost-effective disease prevention and management of patients with chronic illness which also have the potential to build on and reinforce each other as a coherent, sustainable package of delivery system improvements. The first delivery system is the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH), which provides patients with a primary care physician and a team that can deliver personalized, whole person, coordinated care across