In the debate over whether or not Medicare should be available to everyone, like it is to really poor people, soldiers, old people and members of Congress, one thing gets lost in the cost discussion; things are so expensive because lawyers love to sue.
By vilifying doctors and hospitals and insurance companies, as populist efforts to jam through healthcare reform have done, advocates are reaffirming the notion that it's okay to sue over everything because the medical community are all just greedy corporations we are being told to hate.
The American Journal of Medicine Editor-in-Chief Dr. Joseph Alpert says
When he was training at Harvard Medical School, he says, the rule for good patient care was "Don't order any test or intervention (medical or surgical) that has little or no chance of improving the patient's quality or length of life" against the current rule: "Order a huge array of tests, including radiographic imaging, to rule out every conceivable clinical condition including very unlikely diagnostic entities."
The cost for medicine is not so high because of greedy corporations, it is so high because of 'defensive' medicine - staggering volumes of unnecessary diagnostic testing in place to prevent lawsuits and that have no value at all in helping patients.
There can be no healthcare reform if that is not fixed - instead, taxpayers will just be paying double due to the added layer of government bureaucracy.
