Loading ...Remember the gov’t looking the other way on illegal immigration? The IRS scandal? Fast and Furious? Creating false evidence of US Dealers selling guns to drug cartels?
You can’t trust ANYBODY these days…Check this out….WATCH OUT. After de-industrialization, off shoring revenue, anything goes if it generates revenue.
Remember those artificially high home appraisals? And the “appraisers” are told, they better give a GOOD appraisal of they will be avoided next time? Same thing possible with medical “appraisals” Doctors need from radiological or testing labs.
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The fee-for-service nature of U.S. health care, where the hospitals and doctors get more money for every operation they perform, essentially rewards those that put more patients under the knife.
“There’s no financial reason not to do it, so there’s no pressure,” says Leape, the Harvard physician. “There are no regulators breathing down their backs; Medicare and the insurance companies continue to pay for it.”
“Doctors perform thousands of unnecessary surgeries”
A USA TODAY study found that tens of thousands of times each year, patients undergo surgery they don’t need.
Jonathan Stelly was 22, a semi-pro baseball player aiming for the big leagues, when a fainting spell sent him to his cardiologist for tests. The doctor’s office called afterward with shocking news: If Stelly wanted to live to age 30, he was told, he’d need a pacemaker.
Stelly knew it would be the end of his baseball dream, but he made a quick decision. “I did what the doctor said,” he recalls. “I trusted him.”
Months after the surgery, local news outlets reported that the Louisiana cardiologist, Mehmood Patel, was being investigated for performing unnecessary surgeries. Stelly had another doctor review his case. Then another. And another. They all agreed: He needed blood pressure medication, but he never needed the pacemaker.
“It’s a very serious issue, (and) there really hasn’t been a movement to address it,” says Lucian Leape, a former surgeon and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. Leape, a renowned patient safety expert who began studying unnecessary surgery after a 1974 congressional report estimated that there were 2.4 million cases a year, killing nearly 12,000 patients.
Leape’s take today? “Things haven’t changed very much.”