Word: dartmouth
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...care; most of us assume that more treatment is better, that the best doctors are the ones who do the most to us, that our health costs are the world's highest because our health care is the world's most thorough. But a slew of research by the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice has found that as much as 30% of our annual $2 trillion-plus medical bill may be wasted on unnecessary care, mostly run-of-the-mill diagnostic tests, office visits, hospital stays, minor procedures and prescriptions for brand-name wonder drugs advertised...
...time, and so do our factories and other ostensibly profit-maximizing businesses. Health care usually costs us money too, and even when co-payments are low, visiting the doctor is time-consuming and inconvenient, and staying in the hospital can be downright dangerous. Still, Dartmouth has documented enormous regional variations in medical care that produce virtually no variation in medical outcomes, a testament to our tolerance for overtreatment...
...help their customers save electricity and avoid the need for new generating plants. So that's what they did. Energy providers were much better than the government at influencing the behaviors of energy consumers. "That's what we need in health care," says Dr. Elliott Fisher of the Dartmouth Institute. "When providers get rewarded for volume, they provide volume. That's got to change." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...Alas, there's no proven link between more spending and better care. The good news is that parts of the country provide care at a low cost, so there's potential for gigantic savings if the rest of the U.S. could imitate them. One Dartmouth study found that if nationwide spending had mirrored the modest rate of that in Rochester, Minn. - where care is dominated by the renowned Mayo Clinic - Medicare would have reduced its costs for chronically ill patients by $50 billion from 2001 to 2005. As the old inflation-adjusted saying goes, pretty soon you're talking about...
...telling doctors what to do, suppressing the development of lifesaving technologies, ignoring the needs of minorities in pursuit of one-size-fits-all "cookbook medicine," destroying an American tradition of personalized care. "It's a $2 trillion industry with blood in the water," says James Weinstein, head of the Dartmouth Institute. "You can't be surprised that the sharks are circling...