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Why Health Care Costs so Much

By Stuart Buck, Esq.

Yet another fascinating article by Atul Gawande, whose main inquiry is why some cities spend so much more on health care than elsewhere, with no better results. He ultimately ties it to the financial incentive doctors have to do more procedures (and some places are more successful than others in resisting that incentive): Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country?s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn?t going to solve this problem...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on May 28, 2009 (boomark / email).