Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Is health care the problem or skyrocketing disease management?


Answer:
Both are part of a system that needs worked on.Coach
I'm not sure what you mean. Health care financing is certainly an area for heated discussions. It seems that the love of money is indeed the root of all evil.
Put yourself in the position of having a parent, spouse, or child in the ER in critical condition, what would you tell the doctor?
a) do everything you can to save them
b) do a few things to save them, but not too much or the expensive stuff
c) just try the easier or least expensive treatments to save themAlmost everyone will surely pick option a. This is one of the major underlying issues for increasing health care costs in the US, people want perfection in health care. They want everything that can be done to be done. In this pursuit it pushes physicians and health care systems to use the newest (and subsequently most expensive) technologies.One of the most straight forward examples of this is premature births. 20-30 years ago, babies that were 3 months premature rarely survived. Part of this was due to the care and treatment options available to them: TLC, feeding, and a few medications. Today, it is routine for babies born this premature to survive due to amount of care and advanced procedures now available. However, an invitro surgery to fix a heart defect costs a little more than having a couple nurses watch over a handful of children 24hrs a day.Add on top of this the costs of malpractice insurance and cost of lawsuits against insurcance companies if they ever deny someone a procedure and it again raises health care costs and 'easy out' of using the most advanced (and costliest) procedures to avoid being sued.So as long as US consumers continue to demand the physiciancs continue to do everything possible to save a life or treat arthritis, or prevent heart attacks, or reduce cholesterol, repair a damaged knee, companies will research newer and better therapies to help physicians respond to their customers demands. The next question is, should our government step in to interfere with this process and move to a socialized medicine model, that is used in much of the rest of the world, where procedures are assigned based on need and expected outcome rather than a hope that this last ditch effort with a 2% chance of sucess be pursued?

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