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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, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday September 25 2014, @03:46AM
You might find an old Reader's Digest article from 1997 interesting. In it, William Ecenbarger, the author, visited a bunch of dentists in different states to see how close their diagnoses of his teeth matched up. An unhealthy percentage of dentists tried to sell him wildly excessive treatment, pitching oral surgery, root canals, or crowns everywhere when all he needed was a cap on 1 or 2 teeth. More recently, Time ran an article on this issue called "Bitter Pill", in which they mention the "chargemaster", the mystery black box that determines what to charge for medical care.
It's clear to me that the entire medical profession in the US suffers from some serious conflicts of interest. So pervasive is it that even honest doctors have a difficult time resisting the pressures or seeing past all the propaganda-- the heavily biased studies about the effectiveness of the latest brand name drugs, the dishonest hiding of costs, peer pressure, and more. If you think it's hard to estimate how much time a software project will take, you at least have a foundation of honest data to start with. Try to get the costs of a medical procedure, and if you get anything back at all, you won't get the same answer twice. When inquiring about costs, I've been told not to worry about it, because insurance will cover it. Or assured that the costs, whatever they are exactly, will be reasonable. Or told that they themselves don't know the costs because they don't yet know what's needed. There could be extra work, you see. It's crazy.
When I at last do see some price info, it can't be trusted at all. What happens is they bill your insurance, if you have it. Your insurance "adjusts" their crazy high fantasy land prices by knocking off about 2/3 of the amount they charge. You are them responsible for 10% or 20% (or whatever amount your insurance leaves for you to pay) of the 33% of the list price. But, if your insurance rejects the bill, then the doctors come after you. They send you the fantasy bill, which includes crap like $100 for "medical supplies", bandages and cotton balls and such like you could get at any pharmacy for 1/10th what they charge. You thought you were on the hook for a $50 copay, but insurance denied them so the doctors are now asking you for $1500! They don't tell you what really happened, they try to present that demand for $1500 like it's any other bill, like for cell phone service or something. If you pay up like a good honest citizen, you were just played for a total chump. It's sick.
Medics have been doing this for decades. I don't know how far back this price gouging goes, but it's at least to the mid 1960s. One thing we've done about it is forgo treatment, even to the point that people have died because they couldn't afford treatment. Our life expectancy is now lower in the US than most other developed countries.