The U.S. health system wastes more than $750 billion a year – or 30 percent of medical expenses – in unnecessary, inefficient services, and each year tens of thousands of deaths could be averted through better care, according to a report released Thursday by the Institute of Medicine.

Despite those sobering figures, the 18-member committee behind the national report, which includes several Bay Area health experts, concluded that improving quality and lowering cost is not only possible but could be done with tools and technologies that exist.

‘In some ways, the American medical system is the best the world has ever seen. We do things every day that are exceptional, almost miraculous,’ said the committee’s chairman, Dr. Mark Smith, president and chief executive officer of the California HealthCare Foundation, a health care philanthropic group in Oakland.

Smith also described a ‘maddening paradox’ in which patients get either too little treatment or too much and a system that ‘rushes some things into widespread practice before there have even been enough studies and there are other things we have known for 100 years and still can’t get people to do.’

The report outlines a series of recommendations to improve the system, including rewarding health care providers […]