Word: cat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...doctors generally agree that expensive technology is used much more often than it needs to be, again because no one is watching costs. For instance, hospitals scramble to buy the fanciest equipment available. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano charges that hospitals in Southern California contain enough CAT scanners to serve the entire Western...
...people (cooks, cleaners, clerks) so sharply that, for example, wages and benefits now take 70% of the budget of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, vs. 35% only 20 years ago. The introduction of expensive machinery raises rather than lowers labor costs. For example, if a hospital buys a CAT (computerized axial tomography) scanner, a kind of super X-ray machine, it must also hire highly trained, highly paid technicians...
Seventy-six years later, the computerized axial tomography, or CAT, scanner, hailed as the greatest advance in radiology since the discovery of X rays, appeared on the medical scene. Combining X-ray equipment with a computer and a television cathode-ray tube, this revolutionary diagnostic device can visualize cross sections of the human body to detect, among other disorders, tumors, blood vessel damage and bile duct obstructions. But whereas an X-ray machine cost $50 in 1896, today's CAT scanner may run to $700,000 or more...
...CAT has become something of a whipping boy in the current cost-containment controversy, a symbol of the insanely soaring expenses of the U.S. medical care system. Government officials and consumers are questioning whether the benefits derived from the flood of innovative techniques of the past 20 years justify the high cost. Even physicians who traditionally have taken to the new technology with the enthusiasm of small boys trying out new toys, are voicing doubts...
...case of the CAT scanner, for instance, most doctors would agree with the Boston physician who observes: "It has all but relieved us of doing angiograms or putting air into people's brains. Both of those had an element of risk and were not nearly so accurate as the CAT." But when it comes to the usefulness of whole body scanning there is considerably more disagreement, even though evidence is mounting in the machine's favor. Another important question is how many of the devices the country needs, and can afford...