Giving Compass' Take:

• TriplePundit digs into a new study from the Journal of the American Medical Association that is eye-opening about where costs come from in our health care system. No surprise: admin costs are higher than other countries. Surprise: we use more generic drugs than elsewhere, but our prescriptions still cost more.

• Can we do anything once the problem of inefficiency is identified? One possible solution is to force pharmaceutical companies to have more transparency when it comes to price and quality. But squabbling over Affordable Health Care Act details has been a distraction in Washington.

• Maybe Amazon has an answer! This article identifies ways that private corporations are partnering to tackle the thorny issue of health care.

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association looks across the health care systems of the 10 highest-income countries around the globe to examine what makes our system uniquely inefficient — spending almost twice as much per person, with worse population health outcomes on measures like life expectancy.

What the authors find — that our health care prices and administrative costs are significantly higher than everywhere else’s — isn’t a complete surprise. Yet the authors also were able to challenge some long-held assumptions about the reasons for our nation’s exceptionally poor health care value.

Higher salaries for doctors and nurses in the U.S. are not explained by the cost of medical education. The prices for brand-name drugs are higher in the U.S. and thus we spend more on prescription drugs even though our generic drug usage is higher than in other countries. Our administrative costs, at 8 percent of spending, are higher than the 1-3 percent range in the other countries.

We also have a larger population of uninsured along with the highest amount if dissatisfaction with the health care system in general.

Ultimately these results, in challenging common explanations and settling on others, should help policymakers refocus and act with urgency to address our inefficient and expensive system through new legislative ideas and through building on current reform efforts.

Read the full article about the inefficiencies in the U.S. health care system by Joshua Gordon at TriplePundit.