Your money vs. Your health

It is truly ridiculous that we are draining away more than $1.2 trillion each year in health care; yet we are not nearly close to being the healthiest nation in the world. I totally agree with “any money that is spent on a patient that does not improve the outcome is a waste” by Garson from the CNN article. Reducing the cost of the health care can be advantageous for patients, but budget cutting in the health care providers, medical technology and pharmaceuticals may not be too beneficial for the patient in return.

The unnecessary tests and procedures that doctors order to protect themselves against malpractice suits is an absolute waste of money and time of the patient. However, the worst part is when patients are exposed to harmful side effects such as x-ray radiation and the over-use of prescription drugs from the unnecessary testing. In this case, patients are not only wasting their money and time but in fact, are getting worse outcomes in terms of quality of health care. The article also said that doctors order defensive medicine simply out of greed. Clearly, a balance between malpractice issues and cost of the health care is needed. President Obama also briefly mentioned that he wants the Dept of Health to work with states to reduce malpractice suits in his recent proposal on last Wednesday. The defensive medicine drives the cost of health care up to $ 210 billion every year; therefore we do need some kind of policy or regulation to prevent a larger amount of money directly going to the drain from the defensive medicine.

Because emergency room medical care is more expensive than routine medical care, we must reduce the number of non-emergencies seen. Most of the users of ER are poor and uninsured people; hence the high price of ER could have been avoided with much lower investments in the primary care unless they need immediately treatments. Here, we need to emphasize more on access of health care. The goal of recent health care reform is to cover all people in U.S. Obama's plan will allow them to treat people with preventative care which is much cheaper and will reduce overall number of emergency room visits. On the other side, if we are to insure 47 million more people, don’t we need more money to cover all of them?

We are spending almost 1/3 of our health care expenditures in administration costs. I believe that the EHR will help save billions in health care costs through improving efficiency and reducing the number of unnecessary medical documents. It definitely would be faster, more legible, and most importantly, advantageous in minimizing the cost of administration and increasing investment on areas actually efficient such as primary care.

The definition of quality in the health care can be varied by individuals; it may deal with the satisfaction of patients and better health outcome. But I strongly believe that access must be the first step toward achieving the quality of health care system.