Word: nationalized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...unjustified surgery, unnecessary hospitalizations, unneeded tests and an unwillingness even to consider costs do no one any good. The time is past when the nation could accept the resultant inflation as an inevitable side effect of good health; the price is simply becoming too high...
...medical service, health costs have risen from 9.5% of G.N.P. in 1974 to 11.3% last year. As in Germany, the government is pressing for a hold-down; among other things, Sweden routinely denies expensive organ transplants to people over 70?a cruel but 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...
...they can voluntarily hold down the increase in their costs. Controls would go into effect only if hospitals fail to keep their average annual increase to 9.7%, plus an adjustable figure to compensate for general inflation. That is hardly a stingy rise. Even so, more than half of the nation's nearly 6,000 community hospitals, mainly those in small towns and in states with effective cost control laws already on the books, would be exempt from controls. The country's 1,200 other hospitals, including psychiatric and federal hospitals, would also be exempt...
...Coronary bypass surgery was introduced in 1967 to combat coronary-artery disease, the nation's No. 1 killer. The disease is characterized by narrowing of the arteries that supply blood to the heart muscle, leading to severe chest pains known as angina pectoris, or to heart attack and sudden death. In the operation doctors graft portions of a leg vein around the clogged part of the artery, thus creating a detour or bypass for the blood. Last year more than 80,000 such operations were performed. The average cost: $10,000 to $15,000. Despite its growing...