California could cut $110 billion in healthcare spending over the next decade, saving the average household $800 a year, by quickly moving away from conventional fee-for-service medicine and embracing more coordinated care, a new report says. These findings come from the Berkeley Forum, a new group of healthcare executives, state officials and academics that studied California’s healthcare market for the last year in hopes of finding ways to make care better and more affordable. The main recommendations are not entirely new, and these shifts are already underway in response to the federal healthcare law and pressure from employers to tame runaway medical costs. But the report does quantify how much work remains to be done and the potential savings if major changes are made in how doctors and hospitals are paid according to a recent story published in the Los Angeles Times.
