MISDIAGNOSIS?….In our current issue, Phil Longman reviews Sick, Jon Cohn’s new book about the dysfunctional American healthcare system. But he thinks Cohn has misdiagnosed the disease. Money can’t really be our core problem, he says, since the evidence indicates that the more you spend, the worse your treatment is likely to be:
According to a recent RAND study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, uninsured patients receive only 53.7 percent of the care experts believe they should get — that is, appropriate, evidence-based treatment. But according to the same study, patients with private, fee-for-service insurance are even less likely to receive the proper care. Indeed, among Americans receiving acute care, those who lack insurance stand a slightly better chance of receiving proper treatment than patients covered by Medicaid, Medicare, or any form of private insurance.
….[Dr. Elliot Fisher] found that in America’s highest-spending hospitals, only 74.8 percent of heart attack victims receive aspirin upon discharge from the hospital, as opposed to 83.5 percent in lower-budget competitors. This may be one reason why survival rates for heart attack victims are actually higher in low-spending hospitals than in high-spending hospitals.
What’s more, these spendthrift hospitals often skip other routine preventative care such as flu vaccines, Pap smears, and mammograms. This general lack of attention to prevention and follow-up care in high-spending hospitals helps to explain why not only heart attack victims but also patients suffering from colon cancer and hip fractures stand a better chance of living longer if they stay away from “elite” hospitals and choose a lower-cost provider instead. Given this reality, it is perhaps not surprising that patient satisfaction also declines as a hospital’s spending per patient rises.
So what does Longman think the answer is? Click the link to find out. Or buy his new book. Or buy ’em both.
