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In an article in The Atlantic, Shannon Brownlee, an instructor at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI), and her co-authors write that when it comes to a definition of “health care costs,” everyone “uses the term to mean something different.”

Brownlee and co-authors Thomas Walsh, a post-doctoral fellow at the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science and a lecturer at TDI, and Joe Colucci of the New America Foundation’s Health Policy Program say the variety of meanings “creates confusion even among experts, to say nothing of the public, and is getting in the way of a frank discussion about how the nation can address the central challenge: that we are spending more and more on health care without seeing equivalent improvements in health.”

“Framing our problem in terms of ‘costs’ is a misrepresentation of the real challenge—how to slow the increase in spending,” they write.

Read the full story, published 12/22/12 in The Atlantic.