Why is American health care so expensive?

The joy of locum tenens work is that I can, actually, take a vacation. I have been working a lot, and so now I am going to be away from anything that begets blogs about medical care for most of a month. I will be singing polyphonic music in the Republic of Georgia and canoeing, briefly, in the Skagit River. I will miss the doctoring, but only a little bit. I will then return and jump right back in, with both feet. I might write another blog while I am in foreign lands, but probably not, so I'm guessing I'll be checking in again sometime in early October.

It is a very odd thing that most doctors, especially ones who really love what they do, provide advice and sometimes treatment to family members and good friends. It is also held to be true that this is a bad practice. How do we reconcile this? In 1847 the AMA published its first "code of medical ethics" which covered many subjects and, though short, is dense and diatribe-like. It seemed to me, when I read through it, that it was mainly concerned with discouraging various forms of quackery, which was rampant in the relatively unregulated environment of the early 19th century in the United States. We physicians were enjoined to "unite tenderness with firmness and condescension with authority" and our patients were reminded that they needed to do what we told them and not fuss and argue with us. Physicians were required to be always available to sick patients, to get consultation when necessary, to treat those who could not afford to pay. In turn, patients were told...

In 2003 the Medicare Modernization Act established the Recovery Audit Contractor (the RAC) program to evaluate Medicare overpayment. It was extended to involve all 50 states in 2006 and will eventually involve Medicaid payments as well. The government hired 4 companies to audit payments to hospitals, durable medical equipment suppliers, physicians and other providers throughout the country. Health Data Insights is responsible for the largest geographical area, including my state, Idaho. Since 2006 we have expected visits and inquiries from various individuals involved in the audits, and eventually we expect that we will all be presented with requests for repayment of money to Medicare in settlement of what the auditors believe are overpayments. This is definitely happening but, other than various highly publicized cases of fraud, I haven't heard that this process has been particularly odious or destabilizing. Nevertheless, in Medicare's report to Congress last year ( http://w...

During an internal medicine residency, newly hatched doctors are responsible for some of the sickest patients in their teaching hospitals. This is because those patients often don't have private doctors to attend them and are poor and sometimes self abusive, with the complex problems that go with smoking, drug and alcohol abuse and lack of regular medical care. These patients often present with their diseases late in game, when much must be done quickly. There is little or no time to discuss end of life issues and so the assumption is made that these folks want "everything done" which includes machines and potions to support organs and bodily functions as they cease to work right. A scenario might look like this: 48 year old heroin abuser comes in with fever of 104 and symptoms of a stroke. He is admitted to the intensive care unit with low blood pressure, becomes gradually delirious and his heart rate increases, he is sedated for trying to crawl out of bed and run off, h...

Atul Gawande, a surgeon who writes for the New Yorker magazine, recently wrote an article about how the medical profession might learn from a large restaurant chain how to provide really good service inexpensively. I was intrigued, because I would very much like to see medical care get better and cheaper, and find it very frustrating that progress is so slow. But I was also a little horrified by the vision of my profession becoming another mindnumbingly reproducible chain restaurant. One of the reasons that medical care has been expensive and not successfully focused on customer satisfaction is that physicians, at least good ones, are kind of scarce and have been trained in a culture that makes us consultants rather than service personnel. (Also, of course, the fact that we are usually paid by a deep pocketed third party without much consciousness of what the consumer really wants is a major issue.) If we, as physicians, are available to help solve a person's medical problems we ...

When I drive down a street and see only national chain restaurants and retail stores, I am sad. Can we do no better than this, to make everything the same, supporting certain foods, certain products at the expense of the tremendous variety of such things that exist? Atul Gawande just wrote a very compelling article  in which he explored the chain restaurant The Cheesecake Factory as a model or metaphor for good health care.  He not only ate there, but toured the facility and observed the processes that allow this huge place to provide food that is interesting, delicious and affordable. His main thesis is that an industry that standardizes excellent practices can provide high quality care, and that it is not unthinkable that medicine could be substantially improved by adopting such a model. He also looked at some excellent hospitals that have begun to standardize such things as patient care in the ICU and total knee replacements. There are many things that, through scientif...

The actual secret to long life is continuing to breathe. The body has many amazing processes that go on all the time, little tiny molecular ones and microscopic cellular ones, organs that digest, produce hormones, pump blood, big juicy custard-like organs that think thoughts, stringy nerves and muscles that propel us, reproductive organs that beget poetry and children. It would be hard to judge any of them as being the most necessary, but the process of breathing would be a top contender. People stop breathing for all kinds of reasons, most commonly because they have lived out their span of years and are done. When everything else ceases to work and the brain no longer gives adequate signal to the muscles of respiration to defy the elastic recoil of the diaphragm, chest wall and lungs, breathing stops. But sometimes breathing ceases or becomes ineffective because of a drug overdose, a lung inflammation or infection, morbid obesity, fluid overload, tumors, trauma, a reversible cardiac...