What Doctors Don’t Know about Health Costs
Various parts of this:
1. Teach it in Medical School. Medical students are bombarded with an onslaught of medical coursework to master in a short period of time. A good doctor must learn to be clinically competent, articulate, and compassionate; but are they ever taught to be cost effective? This aspect of medical care is so low on the priority list of learning that it simply does not get taught in a meaningful way in medical education.
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4. Accept Reality. Healthcare is not free so we need to seriously consider how much money a life is worth. Every life is “priceless” in its own way, but do you want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the last days of each life in the intensive care unit, knowing the outcome will be death? This should be a very public discussion, but we can’t seem to do it without invoking “death panels” and “pulling the plug on granny”.