“Oh, Snap!” Moment while reading JAMA?
I was reading an article in this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked into the perceived quality of care of patients in medicare and per-capita spending. Basically they wanted to see if people in regions with lower spending were more or less satisfied than Medicare beneficiaries in regions with higher spending. To put it into perspective, per-capita medicare expenditures in Miami, Florida was nearly $12,000 compared to $5,700 in Minneapolis.
The result was that there’s not a significant difference in an individual’s satisfaction with their medical care. The “oh, snap. no you did’n” moment came when I read the last paragraph in the study:
This study suggests that, should fundamental changes in the structure of the US health care system occur so that the lowest expenditure quintile is viewed as the benchmark, the fraction of patients who view their care as inadequate or constrained will not, in the long term, increase above current levels. Instead, we suspect that the limiting factor in restraining cost growth or in fundamental reform will be the extent to which the medical community will be able to adjust to new standards for what constitutes appropriate medical practice.
(my emphasis) So, doctors, stop performing expensive, sometimes unnecessary procedures.
What drives costs up? A commentary in the same issue points out that direct-to-consumer advertising, and procedure specialties in particular regions that increases the likelyhood of having that procedure performed on you than if you lived somewhere where procedure was not in vogue.
Tags: healthcare
May 12th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Who reads JAMA to pass the time? That’s a very disturbing finding. Could’ve saved 5 Gs! I was living in Miami for a few years and initially was blown away at the commercials for breast augmentation at “reasonable prices”. It wasn’t the prices but the constant competing ads that seemed to have as a foregone conclusion that every woman should have breast implants. Then you go down to South Beach and it kinda looks like they did- on their way back from Botox.