Today's Blog: Time for the Guv to morph into Chris Christie My husband and I and a couple hundred friends watched in Green Bay as ...(more) Search Archives

Blogs

Time for the Guv to morph into Chris Christie (6/28/2011)

Time for Gov. Walker to talk more about the cake (3/4/2011)

Today, reality hits home (3/1/2011)

FoxPolitics News going on hiatus (1/28/2011)

Brown County Executive candidate forum Feb. 8 (1/28/2011)

Education done right (1/27/2011)

To Obama, the ‘We’ is Government (1/27/2011)

(more)

I want Medicare to determine what benefits it will make available, based on costs and other considerations, and then simply not pay for those that don't pass their tests,” he says. That doesn’t sound especially incendiary – except that Medicare isn’t supposed to consider cost and the health overhaul bills in Congress bar the program from using the results of comparative-effectiveness studies to decide what to cover.

His new book, "Taming the Beloved Beast – How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System,” critiques costly pharmaceuticals and medical devices that Callahan says drive costs ever upward. “Our whole health care system is based on a witch’s brew of sacrosanct doctor-patient autonomy, a fear of threats to innovation, corporate and (sometimes) physician profit-making, and a belief that, because life is of infinite value, it is morally obnoxious to put a price tag on it,” he writes.

Callahan, however, continues to believe that after people have lived a reasonably full life of, say, 70 to 80 years, they should be offered high quality long-term care, home care, rehabilitation and income support, but not extraordinary and expensive medical procedures. He rejects the effort to find a medical remedy to every condition. (Of erectile dysfunction, he says, “You get old. That’s the way it goes, guys.”)

…. Q: Would you say, then, that American culture is the main thing driving technology costs upward, rather than financial gain?

A. It’s a lot of things. Patients love it and expect it. Everybody likes their doctor to talk to them, but if the doctor merely talks to them, they get a little suspicious. Doctors are well-paid to use [technology], companies are making billions of dollars selling it. Another feature that doesn’t get picked up is the focus of the media on medical technology.

…. FDA tests for safety and efficacy -- they don’t deal with cost at all. We could have every manufacturer of drugs or devices release an economic impact statement. The drug company would say, ‘Our marketing shows it’s going to affect 10,000 patients, and this is what it’s going to cost the health care system.’ That would force companies to begin to think, ‘Could this cost less?’ I also suspect it would change the priorities of the research. The difficulty now is that a drug company, with these very expensive drugs, can make a pretty good profit even if they don’t have a lot of patients, and even if people go bankrupt buying their product -- which a lot do.

Medicare is going to run out of money shortly, and we’re finding more and more expensive ways to keep people alive. So we have to find ways to set some limits.

Post a Reply

Print this Article

Email Article to a Friend