One approach to building an HSA data base.

This paper discusses one approach for Health Systems Agencies to focus their information acquisition and analysis activities on subjects which will be most helpful to them in gaining visibility and credibility, while also offering opportunities for identifying and quantifying the most serious problem confronting them--the rapid rise in health care expenditures. Assembling information on health care expenditures will have the additional benefit of allowing the planning agencies to isolate and monitor the possible effects which their actions may have on changes in health care costs. This may become particularly critical in a few years when the Congress and HEW are less patient and more insistent that evidence of clear cost control benefits will have to be produced if the nation is to continue to invest in health planning. In general, as health care costs have continued to climb, serious questions have been raised about the ability of the taxpayers, employees, and employers, through insurers, to continue to pay for even the health services and benefits now available. At a minimum, severe fiscal pressures will seriously threaten existing entitlements and coverage. Health planning could be a major tool to reduce cost inflation and protect other social and health programs while simultaneously permitting the introduction of needed and desirable innovations. Health planning could be a significant instrument for shifting health system investments, especially capital investments, into those areas which may produce more health at the margin than current expenditures.