Word: doctorate
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...directly to drive up costs. Many insurance companies will pay for lab tests only if they are done in a hospital on a supposedly sick patient. The result is to encourage hospitalization of untold thousands of people who could be diagnosed and/or treated at far less cost in a doctor's office. Says one Houston physician: "Say a man in his late 30s to early 40s complains of chest pains. I tell him he needs a thorough physical. In the office my fee would be $45, the tests $250, for a total of $295. But I have...
...worst result of the system of third-party payments, however, is a far more insidious one: since the government and private insurers pick up most medical bills, no one in the system has an incentive to hold down those bills. On the contrary: if a doctor or a hospital substitutes an inexpensive treatment for a costly one, he or it merely collects less money from Medicare, Medicaid, a Blue plan or a private insurer...
...Doctors feel they have a right to charge high fees?their median income is a towering $65,000 a year?to make up for the long training they must undergo and the 80-hour weeks that many say they put in, and to compensate them for bearing the responsibility of making life-and-death decisions. Says one Boston specialist with an international clientele: "Remember that when a doctor has finished seven or eight years of schooling, two or three years of internship, two or three years of specialization, by then he is married, starting a family and an expensive practice...
Says Dr. Noel Thompson of Stanford University and the Palo Alto Medical Clinic in California: "The doctor who does something to the patient?sticks something down his throat or up the other end of his anatomy, cuts him open or takes his picture?receives a much larger amount of money." A fierce dispute rages over how much unnecessary surgery is performed on Americans each year. Though the precise figure is impossible to pin down, no one doubts that at least some doctors will operate on patients who could get by without surgery simply because the Government or a private insurer...
...necessary form of rationing. Britain's National Health Service has done a better job of holding down costs; medical outlays as a percentage of G.N.P. (5.6% at last count, in 1977) have been fairly stable. But there has been a price to pay. The nation is suffering from a doctor shortage, because many physicians have left the country feeling that they cannot earn enough under NHS, and waits of three to six months for elective surgery are common...