Health care spend, any room to reduce it?

While not strictly looking at quality and cost at a hospital level, a paper just published by OECD examines the potential for savings in health expenditure. It suggest that countries can achieve savings up to 5% of GNP by all countries becoming as efficient as the best performing countries. Note that there does not appear to be much if any correlation between healthcare spend and outcomes across countries. The authors suggest that countries by reaching the level of the best performers would increase life expectancy at birth by two years; in contrast a 10% rise in health expenditure would increase life expectancy by three to four months.