Word: careful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...patient is to be operated on, the surgeons, the anesthesiologist, the pump team, the blood bank in the institution that feeds the pump are involved. The patient goes to a special recovery room with specially trained people to watch him. He's there five days with round-the-clock care. He goes to a rehabilitation unit for the rest of his recovery...
...that a patient could conceivably need. In part, that is done to reassure patients or to protect themselves against malpractice suits. Says Dr. E. Kash Rose, senior radiologist at Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa, Calif.: "One study showed that 80% of skull X rays were unnecessary for care and treatment of patients. Rib X rays are done purely for the mental relief of the patient rather than for medical reasons. The treatment is exactly the same" whether the X ray discloses a fracture...
More fundamentally still, the system of third-party payments may be the root of much medical inflation, but the old-fashioned alternative is a kind of rationing of medical care by ability to pay that the nation now would rightly find abhorrent. Says Rashi Fein, a noted Harvard medical economist: "Medicine is a social product like education. To ration health in terms of price is not the hallmark of a civilized society. You can differentiate between rich and poor with Cadillacs and yachts, but not with medicine...
...Carter Administration's immediate proposal is a bill imposing mandatory controls if the medical profession does not clamp down itself. Government interference is, of course, anathema to hospital officials and doctors. Michael Bromberg, executive director of the Federation of American Hospitals, claims that the public "doesn't care" about the cost problem. "But it is a good issue to demagogue about," he adds, "even if the President loses his bill...
Carter and HEW Secretary Joseph Califano are betting that Bromberg is wrong about a complacent public. Indeed, many members of Congress are feeling so much heat from constituents that they are also seriously beginning to consider a long-range, broad solution to the whole problem of high health care costs. A surprising total of 21 bills