2021-04-01
49 分钟Medicine has evolved from a calling into an industry, adept at dispensing procedures and pills (and gigantic bills), but less good at actual health. Most reformers call for big, bold action. What happens if, instead, you think small?
So I think the general perception is that the american health care system is just messed up.
Is the american health care system as messed up as most people seem to think it is?
Oh, I think absolutely.
The us health system is as messed up as people think it is.
Probably more so.
That is Zach Cooper.
He is a healthcare economist at Yale.
I think the challenge, which makes it hard to address, is that there are pockets of amazing care and amazing innovation surrounded by a sea of dysfunction.
If there are two fundamental drivers of our broken, costly health care system, I would say it's pricing failures and inappropriate care.
And that is Marty Makary.
He is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins and the author of the price we pay what broke American Healthcare and how to fix it.
We did a national survey asking physicians across the country, what percent of medical care, in your opinion, is unnecessary?
The average answer was 21%.
If one in five services delivered in any industry is entirely unnecessary, you'd say, that's where the waste is, and that's where we need to focus.
As we've noted before on this show, even doctors respond to incentives.
And the incentives in our healthcare system encourage procedures more than prevention.
But it's not just unnecessary procedures that McCary's talking about.
Over the past two decades, the number of prescriptions issued in the US has nearly doubled.
Did disease really double?
No.