You have probably heard me rant about the fact the problem with health care is not the prices we pay, but over utilization and lack of coordination of care. Part of that problem is the physician’s fear of being sued. Recently I questioned one of my wife’s doctors about what appeared to me to be some over-testing in the light of past results. He was very frank and admitted he was being overly cautions because of the malpractice concern. And it’s not always the physicians, patients can be demanding as well putting the physician in a difficult position.
The other factor as this article notes is the financial incentives to provide care.
The mystique surrounding medicine and our own fear of “what if?” prevented us and I suspect most patients, from saying “let’s not do this test again, at least not now.” As a result we are trapped in a vicious cycle of tests and more tests and more procedures. And it’s not even about the money, it’s more about what the patient must endure and the risks that accompany all this health care.
Our goal should be receiving the least possible amount of health care that is necessary for diagnosis and treatment … easy to say, perhaps impossible to do.
Promise you will read this entire article at the link provided.
Cardiologist Speaks From The Heart About America’s Medical System : Shots – Health News : NPR.
Cardiologist Speaks From The Heart About America’s Medical System
As a young doctor working at a teaching hospital, Sandeep Jauhar was having trouble making ends meet. So, like other academic physicians, he took a job moonlighting at a private practice, the offices of a cardiologist. He noticed that the offices were quick to order expensive tests for their patients — even when they seemed unnecessary.
It was “made very clear from the beginning” that seeing patients alone was not financially rewarding for the business, he says.
“Spending 20-30 minutes with a patient might be reimbursed $80, $90, but sending the patient for a nuclear stress test was much more profitable,” Jauhar tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “A nuclear stress test, at the time when I started working, was reimbursed roughly $800 to $900.”
Jauhar was supervising the tests that had been ordered by a physician — and some physician assistants.
“So even though I wasn’t ordering the tests, I was in the office while these tests were being performed — and I felt really dirty about it,” Jauhar says.
Jauhar’s new memoir, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician, is about how doctors are growing increasingly discontent with their profession. And they’re facing more pressures: As the number of patients they’re expected to see increases, so does the amount of paperwork. While some doctors who perform a lot of procedures may be paid too much, he writes, many doctors, such as primary care physicians, aren’t paid enough.
And, he adds, “the growing discontent has serious consequences for patients.”
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