Health Care -- The Cost Conundrum (New Yorker)
If you have some time on your hands, you could do a lot worse than read this article from the New Yorker. In it, a reporter goes to the Texas town that has the highest healthcare cost per capita in the US, and in his efforts to find out why this is the case, he uncovers all sorts of interesting things about the US healthcare system, coming to the
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The surgeon gave me an example. General surgeons are often asked to see patients with pain from gallstones. If there aren’t any complications-and there usually aren’t-the pain goes away on its own or with pain medication. With instruction on eating a lower-fat diet, most patients experience no further difficulties. But some have recurrent episodes, and need surgery to remove their gallbladder.
Seeing a patient who has had uncomplicated, first-time gallstone pain requires some judgment. A surgeon has to provide reassurance (people are often scared and want to go straight to surgery), some education about gallstone disease and diet, perhaps a prescription for pain; in a few weeks, the surgeon might follow up. But increasingly, I was told, McAllen surgeons simply operate. The patient wasn’t going to moderate her diet, they tell themselves. The pain was just going to come back. And by operating they happen to make an extra seven hundred dollars.That's INSANE ( ... )
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