Taming Healthcare Costs: Promise and Pitfalls for Women's Health

Abstract

When it comes to healthcare, women are often the primary decision makers for their families. Therefore, focusing on women and their health needs can have a profound effect on health reform efforts to control costs and improve quality for all segments of the population. The promise and pitfalls of cost containment reform in Massachusetts can serve as an informative case study for policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels as they attempt to reduce costs while maintaining quality of care. Massachusetts cost containment law, Chapter 224, seeks to control the healthcare cost growth through innovative approaches to increase efficiency and transparency including the adoption of new delivery system models, investments in wellness and prevention programs, and implementation of standard quality and evaluation measures. In this paper, we outline four approaches to delivering on the promise of cost containment reform to maximize women's access to comprehensive, quality healthcare while avoiding the pitfalls of cost containment's adverse impact on women's health.

Suffering in Silence. Population-Level Detection and Risk-Prediction of Women’s Reproductive Disease from Claims Data

“…In part this is the reason why diseases like diabetes, hypertension, asthma, cancer, and inflammatory diseases are diagnosed and treated after extraordinary delays, seriously affecting the quality of life for individuals and responsible for consuming more than 80% of the US health care budget (1). But, nowhere is this more apparent than for women's healthcare where significant gender biases and disparities exist, not only because the guidelines to diagnose and treat disease come from studies done in the 1990s almost exclusively in men, but also because women are disproportionately affected by conditions with long onsets (2), are "asymptomatic," or are dismissed (3) leaving them "suffering in silence" with long delays that can have serious consequences (4).…”