Word: healthful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...great optimism is justified either when it comes to cutting medical costs overall. Medicine cannot be made cheap, given the costs of its technology, and by its nature it cannot be anything but a seller's market. But U.S. health care bills do not have to shoot up as rapidly as they are doing now. The big question is whether doctors, hospital administrators, insurers and employers can devise ways to bring the public the benefits of technology at an affordable price, without a federal whip being held over them...
Unquestionably, this system has saved innumerable lives and improved the nation's health by encouraging people to seek medical care that they could not otherwise afford (few could without insurance: total payments to doctors and hospitals will work out to more than $3,500 this year for a typical family of four). But the system could hardly have been better designed to fan inflation than if that had been its purpose. It has in effect repealed for medicine the last vestiges of the law of supply and demand, a free market equivalent of the law of gravity, and made health...
While such elaborate procedures might be justified in the case of a heart operation, 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...
...lack of necessity to watch costs would be inflationary in any business. In health care it has been catastrophically inflationary, because powerful underlying forces?economic, psychological and technical?would be working to drive up bills even if a determined effort were made to hold them down. Among these forces...
...program. Dr. William G. Anlyan, vice president for health affairs at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., gives this example: "Today, the patient with a heart problem sees his family practitioner who refers him to a nearby cardiologist, who then refers the patient to a tertiary center like Duke. He's evaluated by a clinical cardiologist, then goes to a group of diagnostic laboratory cardiologists and radiologists. If the 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...