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From Men's Journal:
Every time you walk into a physician's office, you run the risk of overtreatment: Tests you don't need, medications that are ineffective (or dangerous), procedures that cause more problems than they solve. In many cases the best thing for your health is to do nothing.
Make no mistake: A good doctor is, or should be, your most trusted resource if you're sick. If you're not sick and he wants to treat you anyway, that doesn't necessarily make him a bad doctor. But it does make him a player in a system that operates according to the unspoken and often unexamined assumption that more treatment is better for the patient. It's unquestionably better for the financial health of the stakeholders in the system: the doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, the health-insurance companies, and the hospitals. If you don't know how the game is played, the odds go up that you'll wind up the loser.
What do you people think, will people change if they know this?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday September 24 2014, @07:54PM
What's really behind unnecessary tests is how the insurance company will disallow costs. If a doctor orders a blood test, he'll charge $150 and the insurance company will allow only $30. So the perverse incentive is to do more tests because each one is cheaper, and to jack up prices of tests the way a clothing store doubles the price of a t-shirt and marks it 40% off. Price creep gets built into the system. I call it the "Dover effect" because of how the sleepy math book publisher had to radically jack up their cover prices several years ago. They used to sell cheap math books, but the book industry shifted to huge discounts, so they practically doubled their cover prices overnight a while back. Yesterday's $15 book was suddenly a $30 book, just to be able to absorb 30% retailer discounts (remember that publishers get even less because they sell books to retailers at a discount from cover price).
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @09:48PM
No. What happens is that there is no known amount for any particular test. There isn't anything like a common price list, or even anything as fuzzy as an MSRP. What does an MRI cost? Who knows! The insurance companies individually come up with a number that they are willing to pay. Company A may allow $300, Company B $700, and Company C $400. What the providers do is charge them all $700 so that they're sure to get the maximum amount they can from all the companies. The problem is that they aren't allowed to charge different amounts to different groups, and this is why the uninsured person gets screwed because they get charged the full $700. This is one of the biggest reasons that support the arguments for people who advocate a single-payer system.