Medical Costs

Although the central thrust of this blog is toward legal issues, I have submitted a number of posts concerning medial care costs and billing. Since most law firms are small and if they provide health insurance coverage for their employees, we are saddled with the highest medical insurance premiums as are other small businesses. Congress is debating reforms in the health insurance industry. The cost of health care has been rising at a rate far in excess of the general price index some where in the area of 7% per year. We have learned in Texas that restricting the rights of Texans by "med mal reform" has not reduced the cost of health care in Texas. Our health care costs are among the highest in the country. The expenditures for health care varies widely across the country. An article of in the New England Journal of Medicine outlines the problem. They have found the enemy and as Pogo said, "They is us". That is we just use more medical resources than the rest of the country. We use medical procedures that are more complex when simpler, and cheaper, procedures would be better. But we are healthier because of the use of these procedures, wrong. According to the Dartmouth study cited above by Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra: "In fact, the four states with the highest levels of spending—Louisiana, Texas, California, and Florida—were near the bottom of the national rankings on the quality of patient care." We are not only not healthier, but are somewhat less healthy because of the procedures. All medical procedures carry a element of risk, hence, the lower result.
Another article, this time in the New Yorker magazine, pins the cause of the high costs of medical care on the doctors and their "entrepreneurial spirit". That is, where doctors act more like businessmen and less like doctors, their incomes increase, medical costs increase and patient care declines. Like most New Yorker articles it is long, but worth the read.