Unnecessary Care Costs Millions: Washington State Health Waste Calculator™ Analysis
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About this report:
Over the previous three years, Washington’s health care system wasted more than $125 million across roughly 800,000 measured services and cases considered low-value or unnecessary. From harmful opioid prescriptions to all-too-frequent inappropriate tests, hundreds of thousands of residents experienced health care waste.
These dollars could provide more than 2,000 Washington families with full insurance.
We cannot afford to provide wasteful care. Paying closer attention to overuse, underuse, and misuse of health care services will go a long way to delivering equitable quality, costs, and access to Washingtonians and support a resilient and sustainable health care delivery system.
The Alliance applied the Milliman MedInsight Health Waste Calculator™ to the commercial population in our voluntary All-Payer Claim Database to understand waste in Washington. Focusing on 48 common measures that our U.S. specialty medical societies consider wasteful, the results cover three years between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2022.
The Alliance is the first nationally to publicly report how equity — using the Neighborhood Atlas (Area Deprivation Index), which incorporates socioeconomic characteristics such as income, education, and transportation — affects overuse, misuse, and underuse of care.
The report shows compelling trends, and the Alliance provides clear actions we can take together to ensure everyone in Washington is receiving appropriate, high-value care.