LIFE Magazine August 1980 – Healthcare Costs Were 9% of GDP and Rising

by Mark Graban on June 5, 2009 · 1 comment

Yesterday, I shared some old auto industry images and clips from the August 1980 LIFE magazine. More striking to me was an ad from Aetna health insurance, pictured below, the full ad and then some detailed clips below (click any for larger view):

LIFE Magazine August 1980 Healthcare Costs Were 9% of GDP and Rising lean

Surprise, surprise, in 1980, people thought healthcare costs were too high. The ad expresses shock that the U.S. was spending 9% of GDP on healthcare and we need to find ways to reduce that. Well, here we are in 2009 and healthcare is 15.2% of our GDP. Ah, so past solutions didn’t work… or did we save “Trillions” because we’d be at 18% of GDP without the previous fixes? Ah, things like that can never be proven…

 

LIFE Magazine August 1980 Healthcare Costs Were 9% of GDP and Rising lean

So healthcare costs had doubled in five years, and radical changes were proposed (sound familiar?).

LIFE Magazine August 1980 Healthcare Costs Were 9% of GDP and Rising lean

This last part sounds familiar — coordinating care, preventing duplication… all sounds fine in theory, I suppose. Can anyone shed some history on the HSAs and why they worked or didn’t work?

This last clip talks about over-investment in equipment and facilities… idle and open beds isn’t really the problem today, is it?

LIFE Magazine August 1980 Healthcare Costs Were 9% of GDP and Rising lean

I’m certainly not the expert on big-picture issues like this… but sharing the old clips to hopefully get some input from those who know more about the history and issues on this level.

Mark Graban 2011 Smaller LIFE Magazine August 1980 Healthcare Costs Were 9% of GDP and Rising leanAbout LeanBlog.org: Mark Graban is a consultant, author, and speaker in the “lean healthcare” methodology, focused on improving quality and patient safety, improving access, reducing costs, and fully engaging healthcare professionals. He is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus.


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Tagged as: Healthcare

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

1 John Hunter March 15, 2011 at 10:12 am

The long term, macro economic failure of health care in the USA is extremely important. Dr. Deming say the problem and listed excessive heath care costs one of his 7 deadly diseases of western management in the 1980′s and it just gets worse every year (I believe we are at 17.6% of GDP in 2009).
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