HEALTH CARE TODAY: HIGH TECH MEANS HIGH COSTS

by admin on April 2nd, 2009. Filed under General health

Even though modern medicine has enhanced the health and extended the lives of people who would have otherwise perished without it, the advances have come at a price: the amount of money that is required to research and develop these new techniques is enormous, amounting to billions of dollars each year. Someone has to pay for high-tech medicine, and it eventually filters down to the point where it’s paid for by the consumer. And since research must continue so that we can improve on the type of medicine we currently practice, the cost will continue to rise. It is for precisely this reason that the price of medical insurance has gone through the roof since the 1970s and ’80s and it has become impossible for working poor, middle-class, and even upper-middle-class Americans to take advantage of these incredible advances. Only people who are on welfare and receive Medicaid or are elderly and benefit from Medicare are able to benefit directly from the system—that is, besides people who have employer- or self-funded health insurance. Even then, people who have private health insurance are frequently shocked to discover that their insurance sometimes doesn’t cover everything they think it does. Of course, we hear about the great numbers of Americans without health insurance, which is estimated to be 37 to 40 million people. These Americans learn to keep their fingers crossed and maintain their own health; in the case of an injury or major illness affecting themselves or a family member, they either draw on their savings or go into massive debt.

As if all these changes weren’t enough to influence health care in America and point out the need for reform, it is also important for you to realize that even as the medical technology has made significant advances, the type of physician who graduates from medical school has also changed. When I finished medical school in 1975, everyone in my class chose a specialty like plastic surgery, ophthalmologic reconstruction, or another extremely narrow field of medicine. Back then, graduating physicians quickly realized that the glamour and financial rewards of medicine were primarily in doing specialty work, not in general practice. Even those physicians who chose to go into general medicine became specialists in family practice or primary internal medicine. Most physicians also opted for private practice, many times in partnership with another doctor who was in a complementary specialty, like an OB/GYN who shared an office with a pediatrician. And specialists also earned more money than generalists, which undoubtedly helped many new med school graduates with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans staring them in the face to decide their destinies.

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