Columnist details pitfalls of too much health care

Below is the latest “Thinking About Health” column that is being made available to all SDNA members for publication free of charge. These coulmns focus on rural health issues and are made avaiable through the Nebraska Press Association via grant funding The Commonweath  Fund.

Several years ago the prestigious Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed something startling about U.S. healthcare. Many Americans get too much at the same time others get too little. And those in both groups have a good chance of receiving care that could injure or even kill them. That framework for overuse, underuse and misuse caught on and has become the gold standard for how we should think about medical care.

Too little care is easy to understand, and so is care that might kill us, but too much care? How can that be? More is always better, right? That’s certainly what society tells us.

For starters, think direct-to-consumer drug ads, which tell us to ask our doctors about drugs for incontinence, low sex drive, nasal congestion, toenail fungus and any other disease or condition for which they have a cure to sell. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation a few years back found that people do as the ads direct them to do—ask their doctors for the promoted drug. And yep, the docs give patients what they want.

Last week I was visiting with a New York City primary care doctor who told a tale that suggests that this business of crowning consumers kings and queens of the medical marketplace, rules who demand and get what they want has a very big downside.

A trim young man, age 29, who worked in the financial industry and exercised regularly, came to see the doctor. He said he was having dizzy spells and was worried about some neurological disease. The doctor spent nearly and hour with him, taking tests, doing a thorough examination, and concluded nothing was wrong that warranted the neurological the patient was demanding.

The very next day the man was scheduled for one of those super-duper executive physicals that come with the high-paying job he had. That physical also showed no abnormalities that required further examination. Yet the patient persuaded the second physician to give him a referral for an MRI. The MRI also showed nothing that would explain his dizziness.

Not satisfied, he called the first doctor again just to be sure there was nothing wrong with him and again discuss his symptoms. The doctor told me this patient must have racked up over $5,000 in costs to the health care system all paid for directly by his employer or by his generous employer-provided insurance. Much of it was wasted dollars.

Why does this matter to the doctor? After all, he’ll get paid for dispensing his clinical judgment. But in the brave new world of health care consumerism, patients have also found a voice.