ABSTRACT
Promoting good health habits and providing preventive services clearly can reduce many costs while making a more fit nation—an excellent example of the medical-model approach to cost containment. There are two major possibilities for achieving overall control of costs. One involves change in the values and expectations held by the two parties most threatened by payer dominance, physicians and their patients. The other centers on capacity controls: limiting the allocations for health care as one among many claimants to society's resources. The attitudes, expectations, and actions of the primary parties, and their relationship with one another, will crucially affect what can be done to reduce costs while maintaining quality care. Efforts are also under way to increase patient self-responsibility and reduce costs by simplifying the provision of basic information to individuals. In 1984 an economist-physician team of health care writers, Henry J. Aaron and Dr. William B. Schwartz, published a book about thinking the unthinkable in cost control.
