electron1661 wrote:
I agree with OP. Every test, every time I see a doctor, it's another few hundred dollars out of my pocket. Utterly ridiculous. The fees are outrageous and more often than not, they misdiagnose me.
Recently I went to see an urgent care doctor about pain in my ears; he prescribed antibiotics and I took them for a few weeks with no help. Thus began the start of months of seeing different ENTs, getting MRIs, hearing tests, etc. etc. and now, a year later, I still have the same issues and am a few thousand dollars **** out of luck.
This is a total misconception about healthcare spending. It is illegal (for the most part) for a physician who orders "tests" (I assume you mean lab work, biopsies, etc) to own any interest in the lab to which the send these tests. Similarly, it's illegal for a physician who orders imaging studies to own interest in a machine / radiology facility to which they refer patients. These types of arrangements are illegal under self-referral / Stark Laws.
The bills you are likely reciving for such services are NOT from the doctor you see for treatment but rather from a separate physician / facility (radiologist & imaging facility and pathologist & laboratory respectively) who deserve to be paid for the work they do. They Doctor you see doesn't benefit from these studies financially but does need these studies to make a diagnosis or at the very least exclude possible diagnoses (negative studies are equally important to positive studies to limit possible diagnoses). You are connecting the dots incorrectly.
Now, there are unfortunate loop holes to these laws (like the "in office anatomic pathology" exclusion and others for radiology) that need to go away. But, even if these loopholes are closed it will not solve the problem of large corporations (run by MBAs not MDs) buying up all of these types of facilities and physician practices and then having business people force physicians who see patients to refer patient to labs and imaging facilities they (the MBAs) own so that they (MBAs and non-health care providers) can make tons of money off of physician work.
This is why the ban on physician owned hospitals doesn't make any sense from the perspective of someone arguing that there is a "conflict of interest" for physicians in these set ups....becuase it misses the main point of that arguement. That line of argument is essentially saying that it is bad to profit of off medical care and MDs are the only ones who would have such a motivation. But, do you really think that an MBA doesn't have a profit motive? Why is it okay for people with certain degrees--who can through very real mechanisms control physician referrals and ordering practices--to profit off of healthcare? Using this logic if an MD gets and MBA, is then okay for them to profit off of healthcare.
I agree that healthcare costs need to come down but the main problem with US healthcare is not healthcare providers it's this whole network of non-providers (MBAs and JDs) who have built a framework to profit off the system with no regard or understanding of patient care.