Tweet
I hesitate to put this here, because it goes well beyond ObamaCare. My son sent me a copy of this article by Atul Gawande (a surgeon) in the New Yorker.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...ign=pockethits
It is loooooong, but well worth the read. Essentially, he argues that our health care system is grossly inefficient in that we provide too much care, and in many cases this is not only expensive, but dangerous.
We also overdiagnose:
He covers some fascinating case studies, including a study he did comparing health-care costs of two cities in Texas where one city (McAllen) had a system where doctors were grossly over-prescribing tests and treatments because they owned the healthcare companies and were getting rich (Looks like Texas is a mess when it comes to health case - Uncle Ted take note).
Anyway, he argues that while there is much more to be done, ObamaCare has helped to correct this problem.
Would love to here some opinions from our board doctors on this.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...ign=pockethits
It is loooooong, but well worth the read. Essentially, he argues that our health care system is grossly inefficient in that we provide too much care, and in many cases this is not only expensive, but dangerous.
The researchers called it “low-value care.” But, really, it was no-value care. They studied how often people received one of twenty-six tests or treatments that scientific and professional organizations have consistently determined to have no benefit or to be outright harmful. Their list included doing an EEG for an uncomplicated headache (EEGs are for diagnosing seizure disorders, not headaches), or doing a CT or MRI scan for low-back pain in patients without any signs of a neurological problem (studies consistently show that scanning such patients adds nothing except cost), or putting a coronary-artery stent in patients with stable cardiac disease (the likelihood of a heart attack or death after five years is unaffected by the stent). In just a single year, the researchers reported, twenty-five to forty-two per cent of Medicare patients received at least one of the twenty-six useless tests and treatments.
Virtually every family in the country, the research indicates, has been subject to overtesting and overtreatment in one form or another. The costs appear to take thousands of dollars out of the paychecks of every household each year. Researchers have come to refer to financial as well as physical “toxicities” of inappropriate care—including reduced spending on food, clothing, education, and shelter. Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren’t helping them, operations that aren’t going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm.
Overtesting has also created a new, unanticipated problem: overdiagnosis. This isn’t misdiagnosis—the erroneous diagnosis of a disease. This is the correct diagnosis of a disease that is never going to bother you in your lifetime. We’ve long assumed that if we screen a healthy population for diseases like cancer or coronary-artery disease, and catch those diseases early, we’ll be able to treat them before they get dangerously advanced, and save lives in large numbers. But it hasn’t turned out that way. For instance, cancer screening with mammography, ultrasound, and blood testing has dramatically increased the detection of breast, thyroid, and prostate cancer during the past quarter century. We’re treating hundreds of thousands more people each year for these diseases than we ever have. Yet only a tiny reduction in death, if any, has resulted.
Six years ago, in “The Cost Conundrum,” I compared McAllen with another Texas border town, El Paso. They had the same demographics—the same levels of severe poverty, poor health, illegal immigration—but El Paso had half the per-capita Medicare costs and the same or better results. The difference was that McAllen’s doctors were ordering more of almost everything—diagnostic testing, hospital admissions, procedures. Medicare patients in McAllen received forty per cent more surgery, almost twice as many bladder scopes and heart studies, and two to three times as many pacemakers, cardiac bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary stents. Per-capita spending on home-health services was five times higher than in El Paso and more than half of what many American communities spent on all health care. The amount of unnecessary care appeared to be huge.
What explained this? Our piecework payment system—rewarding doctors for the quantity of care provided, regardless of the results—was a key factor. The system gives ample reward for overtreatment and no reward for eliminating it. But these inducements applied everywhere. Why did McAllen succumb to them more than other medical communities did? Doctors there described a profit-maximizing medical culture. Specialists not only made money from the services they provided; many also owned stakes in home-health-care agencies, surgery and imaging centers, and the local for-profit hospital, which brought them even bigger returns from health-care overuse.
What explained this? Our piecework payment system—rewarding doctors for the quantity of care provided, regardless of the results—was a key factor. The system gives ample reward for overtreatment and no reward for eliminating it. But these inducements applied everywhere. Why did McAllen succumb to them more than other medical communities did? Doctors there described a profit-maximizing medical culture. Specialists not only made money from the services they provided; many also owned stakes in home-health-care agencies, surgery and imaging centers, and the local for-profit hospital, which brought them even bigger returns from health-care overuse.
The test of health-care reform, I wrote, was whether McAllen or El Paso would become the new norm. Would McAllen’s costs come down or El Paso’s go up? Now that it has been five years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, I thought I’d find out. I returned to the economist Jonathan Skinner, of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, who had provided the earlier analysis of the Medicare data, and worked with him to get a sense of what recent data reveal. As it turns out, the cost of a Medicare patient has flattened across the country, El Paso included. U.S. health-care inflation is the lowest it has been in more than fifty years. Most startling of all, McAllen has been changing its ways. Between 2009 and 2012, its costs dropped almost three thousand dollars per Medicare recipient. Skinner projects the total savings to taxpayers to have reached almost half a billion dollars by the end of 2014. The hope of reform had been to simply “bend the curve.” This was savings on an unprecedented scale.
Skinner showed me the details. In-patient hospital visits dropped by about ten per cent—and physicians reduced the mad amounts of home-health-care spending by nearly forty per cent. McAllen’s spending on ambulance rides—previously the highest in the country—dropped by almost forty per cent, too.
Skinner showed me the details. In-patient hospital visits dropped by about ten per cent—and physicians reduced the mad amounts of home-health-care spending by nearly forty per cent. McAllen’s spending on ambulance rides—previously the highest in the country—dropped by almost forty per cent, too.
The passage of the Affordable Care Act, in 2010, created opportunities for physicians to practice this kind of dedicated care. The law allows any group of physicians with five thousand or more Medicare patients to contract directly with the government as an “accountable-care organization,” and to receive up to sixty per cent of any savings they produce. In McAllen, two primary-care groups, with a total of nearly thirteen thousand patients, formed to take advantage of the deal. One, as it happens, was led by Jose Peña, the Doctors Hospital at Renaissance internist. Two years later, Medicare reported that Peña’s team had markedly improved control of its patients’ diabetes; patients also had dramatically lower emergency-room visits and hospital admissions. And the two McAllen accountable-care organizations together managed to save Medicare a total of twenty-six million dollars. About sixty per cent of that went back to the groups. It wasn’t all profit—achieving the results had meant installing expensive data-tracking systems and hiring extra staff. But even after overhead doctors in one group took home almost eight hundred thousand dollars each (some of which they shared with their mid-level staff). It was proving to be a very attractive way to practice.
Comment