Sign in  |  Register  |  Help

Most Read on APEsphere

Most Commented on APEsphere

Blogs we like

Resources


Dead tree version

A case study: where money, medicine and greed converge

Add this link to:

Related Links

Report Abuse Cancel

Report Abuse:

So that we can keep the site friendly, legal and on-topic, please click the Report Abuse button if this story breaks the APEsphere Code.

Added by madameape on 26 May 2009
From: www.newyorker.com

Image courtesy colourise via Flickr

The New Yorker has a great piece on healthcare in McAllen, Texas, home to the highest medical costs in the US.  The McAllen case may hold the keys to a viable public healthcare plan, and seems to also have all the key ingredients for a soap-opera miniseries: corruption, greed, sick people and lots and lots of money.


 


This is my favorite paragraph: "About fifteen years ago, it seems, something began to change in McAllen. A few leaders of local institutions took profit growth to be a legitimate ethic in the practice of medicine. Not all the doctors accepted this. But they failed to discourage those who did. So here, along the banks of the Rio Grande, in the Square Dance Capital of the World, a medical community came to treat patients the way subprime-mortgage lenders treated home buyers: as profit centers."

ADVERTISMENT

Comments

Add a comment

Already an APEsphere user? Login for one-click commenting. If not, sign in by email.
 
 
KenAPierce
on 27 May 2009
Agreed.  I will take a look!  Thx.
madameape
on 26 May 2009
Ken, I really encourage you to read the whole New Yorker piece when you have a spare 45 minutes!  It contrasts the case of McAllen with the Mayo clinic, which bills less than half the amount to Medicare per patient per year than the hospitals in McAllen do.  I don't think I need say that the quality of care at Mayo is far from inferior to that in McAllen.  The point of the article is that there are right ways and wrong ways of going about this, and within the US we have examples of both.  Policymakers might want to look at the good and the bad and see if there's anything to learn.  
KenAPierce
on 26 May 2009
THe problem is obvious.  Viewing medicine purely as profit-oriented business is a completely perverse incentive: the doctor/hospital, etc. then has an interest in keeping the patient sick, over-prescribing tests, etc.

The question is this: what legislation can solve this?  It seems to me that any artificial lowering of price will lead to more of this, not less.  If I know I can get the government to pay me per test performed on a patient, I will do more tests.  At the same time, any legislating of what tests may be performed when may tie a doctors hands in cases of legitimate need.

It seemeth to me the only thing that can solve this perverse incentive is some sort of competition.  Competition and real cost to consumer are the only things that will work to lower prices. Right now, we are all the victims of gross collusion (monopoly) in health care.  The government helped to cause this.  I am not so sure they can fix it.