Why Not Better and Cheaper? Healthcare and Innovation

An engaging account of innovation in healthcare and why the results fall short for patients and society.

The evolution of the cell phones we carry in our pockets demonstrates that quality can increase while prices fall. Why doesn't healthcare also get better and cheaper?

In Why Not Better and Cheaper?, James B. Rebitzer and Robert S. Rebitzer offer an answer to this question. Bringing together research on incentives, social norms, and market competition, they argue that the healthcare system generates the wrong kinds of innovation. It is too easy to profit from low-value innovations and too hard to profit from innovations that reduce the costs of care. The result is a healthcare system that is profusely innovative yet remarkably ineffective in discovering ways to deliver increased value at lower cost.

Why Not Better and Cheaper? sheds new light on the trajectory of innovation in healthcare, and how to point innovation in a better direction.

James B. Rebitzer is the Peter and Deborah Wexler Professor of Management at Boston University's Questrom School of Business where he was founding chair of the department of Markets, Public Policy, and Law. Formerly, he was the Mannix Professor of Healthcare Finance and Economics and Chair of the Economics Department at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). He has received The Health Care Research Award from the National Institute of Health Care Management and the Kenneth J. Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association.

Robert S. Rebitzer is a senior advisor at Manatt Health and a Distinguished Career Institute Fellow at Stanford University. Formerly, he was a partner in the healthcare strategy practice of Accenture and a Vice President of UnitedHealth Group. He has also served as an advisor to the California Healthcare Foundation and to Stanford University's Clinical Excellence Research Center. He is currently chairman of the board of El Camino Health System.