Health stories in the news
Should you go overseas for medical care?
Thousands of Americans now go abroad for medical care. The price is right: well-regarded hospitals in India, for example, can charge 60 percent to 90 percent less than a U.S. facility for the same service.
Most Americans go overseas for cosmetic surgery like facelifts and liposuction but an increasing number are going abroad for hip- and knee-replacement surgery, even high-risk heart procedures.
But how does surgical care abroad compare with surgical care here?
Well, according to an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, we don’t know, because most U.S. surgeons don’t report their surgical outcomes.
In their op-ed piece, Arnold Milstein, Mark Smith, and Jerome Kassirer argue that U.S. surgeons should be required to reveal how well they do their job.
As a first step, they write, Medicare should adopt a system the Veteran Affairs hospitals have used for many years that requires surgeons to report their patients’ post-surgical complications during their hospitalization and the 30 days afterward.
They write:
“So should offshore surgery be welcomed as a modest way to make American health care more affordable? We can’t know until we can directly compare the outcomes with those of American surgery. To begin, we must adopt a uniform way for American hospitals and surgeons to report on the frequency of short-term surgical complications.”
To learn more:
- Read Overseas, Under the Knife in the New York Times.
County workers should pay part of their health premiums—Seattle Times
In today’s editorial, the Seattle Times argues that Metropolitan King County employees should be required pay part of their health-care premiums.
The editorial then reviews the positions of four candidates for the county’s executives race: Fred Jarrett, Ross Hunter, Dow Constantine, and Larry Phillips.
The Seattle Times editors write:
“Candidates advocating for employee contributions to monthly premium costs are not being punitive toward public servants. They are realists who understand the precarious budget. County finances limp from crisis to crisis, in part because of outdated employment philosophy.”
To learn more:
- Read the Seattle Times editorial: County workers should pay part of health tab.
Get doctors out of the business side of medicine, says Crosscut blogger
Crosscut blogger and former Seattle School Board member Dick Lilly says to cut medical costs get doctors out of the business side of medicine.
Commenting on Atul Gawande’s article in the New Yorker, Lilly notes that when doctors stand to profit from more medicare services, they’re going to provide more medical services:
To oversimplify: Gawande found that costs are higher in communities where doctors profit from additional procedures (from blood tests to MRIs) because they provide those services in their own clinics (ever hear of mark up?) or own interests in hospitals and testing companies. In communities where care was emphasized, in contrast to the potential for profit from ordering more medical procedures, costs were lower.
The remedy? Lilly says:
What we need are laws that prohibit doctors from owning or investing in hospitals or companies that provide medical services of any kind or make and sell drugs or medical equipment. To be a doctor, you’d just have to be a doctor and only a doctor, not a businessman or clever investor in medicine’s next new thing. There is a difference between the profit motive and the Hippocratic oath. Adherence to the latter would cut America’s cost of health coverage.
To learn more:
- Read Lilly’s blog Let docs be docs.
- Read Atul Gawande’s article: The Cost Conundrum.
- Robert Pear’s article in the New York Times on the impact of Gawande’s article: Health Care Spending Disparities Stir a Fight.
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