Sunday, May 17, 2015

The Over Usage of Medical Care

While modern medical breakthroughs have saved millions of lives, the reality may be that certain medical treatments are also widely overused. According to a recent New Yorker article, "Overkill", in 2010, "the Institute of Medicine issued a report stating that waste" or unnecessary healthcare services "accounted for thirty per cent of healthcare spending". Such unnecessary services include diagnostic tests, pharmaceuticals, and procedures. The result is more Americans spending tremendous sums of money out of pocket when they don't need to, and more money going to Medicare when it could be going to education, for instance.

According to the article, this trend has two primary causes, the first of which is a mentality shared by both doctors and patients. The author of the piece, Atul Gawande, a tumor surgeon, believes that doctors feel an obligation to test for every possibility of illness, saying that "as a doctor, I am far more concerned about doing too little than too much". This is a mentality that might reasonably come along with being in the healthcare field. People take their health very seriously, as they should, and it often leads to unnecessary precautions both issued by doctors and willingly accepted by patients.

The other cause of healthcare waste come not from caution but ignorance. As explained by Gawande, it is what economists call "information asymmetry", and is simply the truth that doctors know far more about treatment and procedures options than patients do. Because of this, many patients tend to blindly follow doctor's advice regardless of whether a doctor truly believes it is in a patient's best interest, a doctor is mistaken, or because it will "enhance a doctor's income". While it may not be entirely malicious, the result of this power that doctors hold causes an over diagnosis of disease. The United States is "treating hundreds of thousands more people each year for diseases", "yet only a tiny reduction in death if any, has resulted".

This trend is directly paralleled with prescription drug usage. As I have learned from my extensive Junior Theme research, although prescription drug use has increased nearly 50 percent in the last decade and a half, America is getting statistically sicker. This increase is in large part due to pharmaceutical industry making it in the best interest of doctors to prescribe their medications by paying them to promote drugs to other doctors and even directly paying them kickbacks for prescriptions. The glaring conflict of interest does not stop their apparently.

What, if anything, should be done to change the way that the medical profession is run? What can be done to make the medical industry more consumer friendly?

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