Is Quality, Not Cost Containment, the Issue with Healthcare in America?

From a 2005 aritcle in the New York Times Magazine, The Quality Cure? (emphasis added):

...Virtually every would-be reformer, Democrat and Republican alike, starts with the presumption that the major problem in health care is high costs. This is understandable: America now spends 15 percent of its gross domestic product on health care. That's a higher percentage than any country has ever spent in the history of the planet, and the figure is increasing. The United States spends more on health care than on automobiles; we spend more on health care than China spends on tea; in fact, as Cutler likes to point out, we spend more on health than the Chinese spend, per capita, on everything. And health care threatens (far more than Social Security) to consume the federal government. Medicare, the health-care program for retirees, and Medicaid, which provides basic services for the poor, already account for one-fifth of the federal budget, and their share could double in a generation.

Curbing such growth has been the aim of every reformer, and according to Cutler, it is the reason reform has failed. The Clinton team proposed to pay for universal coverage by limiting increases in spending (partly through mandatory caps). But limiting spending also meant limiting service. The proposed legislation was never put to a vote.

Managed care was next at trying to contain costs. It succeeded for a while, until it became clear that Americans did not want health-maintenance organizations to limit their choices any more than they wanted the government to. Since then, reform has languished. The Medicare drug bill is suggestive of why. The Republican Congress promised restraint but then passed a hugely expensive law that barred Medicare from using its clout to negotiate prices with drug companies. The pattern has been failed efforts to control costs, followed by a void of new ideas.

Cutler's approach is radically different. He says that most health-care spending is actually good. Spending has been rising, he says, because it delivers positive, and measurable, economic value, and because it can do more things that Americans want. Therefore, Cutler says, we should focus on improving the quality of care rather than on reducing our consumption of it. Rather than pay less, he wants to pay more wisely -- to encourage health-care providers to do more of what they should and less of what is wasteful...