First, I want to link to this
Health Care-related comic by Barry Deutsch of Alas, a blog.
Which pretty much sums up how I feel about our current system.
There's an interesting article in
The New Yorker by surgeon and writer Atul Gawande called "
The Cost Conundrum." Dr. Gawande was also interviewed about the piece today on NPR's
Fresh Air. In brief, Dr. Gawande looks at a Texas border town with extremely high per-capita health care costs (without higher than average quality of care or health outcomes). The conclusion he comes to (and reading it, I could see his conclusion early on in the piece) is that doctors being financially invested in the system drive up costs by driving more business to their own businesses. Compared with non-profit systems (not government-run systems), these areas where the economy is dependent on health care as an industry have much higher costs and more unnecessary procedures, surgeries and care, without better outcomes.
Now, I know that what is an unnecessary procedure is in the eye of the purchaser. But some of the top providers of care in the country are not-for-profit, and have been able to keep costs down.
But reading Dr. Gawande's article, and hearing him a bit on the radio, made me think about weight loss surgeries and how they fit in with what Dr. Gawande is saying. Fat acceptance is a direct threat to the business of those who are profiting from providing the surgery. I would love to see the differences in weight loss surgery rates between systems that are for-profit and those that are not-for-profit.
Thoughts?
Post a Comment