Time
magazine recently published a massive article on health care, “Bitter
Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” by Steven Brill, that should be
read by every citizen of this country. Prepare to be disgusted and outraged as
you read it. The noble field of medicine has been turned into a machine to
manufacture profits.
I have had a couple of personal
experiences with this machine lately.
Last fall my husband had a
respiratory infection he just couldn’t shake. When he went to his doctor he was
given a chest X-ray and the technician who read the X-ray said there was a
strange spot on his lungs. Later that day the doctor called Arthur and
suggested he have an MRI the next day,
as if this was a matter of life and death.
Arthur didn’t go for the MRI
right away, but after a couple of weeks, when he still felt bad, he went. Maybe
the doctor was right to be so emphatic about getting the test, we thought, maybe
there really was something seriously wrong in his lungs and it would be crazy
to ignore it.
Arthur’s doctor is associated
with our local hospital system, which is connected with the huge diagnostic
center where he had the MRI. The test was negative; there’s nothing wrong with
his lungs.
Mr.
Brill wrote about the part that diagnostic machines play in medicine’s manufacture
of profit:
According to a
McKinsey study of the medical marketplace, a typical piece of equipment will
pay for itself in one year if it carries out just 10 to 15 procedures a day.
That’s a terrific return on capital equipment that has an expected life span of
seven to 10 years. And it means that after a year, every scan ordered by a
doctor in the Stamford Hospital emergency room would mean pure profit, less
maintenance costs, for the hospital. Plus an extra fee for the doctor.
Another
McKinsey report found that health care providers in the U.S. conduct far more
CT tests per capita than those in any other country — 71% more than in Germany,
for example, where the government-run health care system offers none of those
incentives for overtesting.
Before the MRI Arthur was
injected with a chemical that caused a very uncomfortable feeling of heat in
his entire body. He probably had pneumonia and was subjected to this MRI for
very dubious reasons if you were just considering his health. But there was
nothing dubious about the reasoning from the point of view of our local medical
profit-factory: Arthur has insurance so he should be fed into the machine.
