USA healthcare costs¶

Tags: personal, thehealthagency

I don’t remember where I saw it (some blog? twitter?), but there’s a hefty, but well-readable article in the New Yorker about the enormous health care costs in the USA.

One main reason: extensive and expensive treatments where no treatment or a way simpler and cheaper treatment will do. A quote: Complications can arise from hospital stays, medications, procedures, and tests, and when these things are of marginal value the harm can be greater than the benefits. In recent years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country does anything like as many operations on its citizens. Are we better off for it? No one knows for sure, but it seems highly unlikely. After all, some hundred thousand people die each year from complications of surgery-far more than die in car crashes.

And another great quote: The most expensive piece of medical equipment, as the saying goes, is a doctor’s pen.

Well worth a read.