Healthcare Cost Reduction Underway

If you google this, you will find lots of posts by healthcare consultants. There is activity in healthcare to reduce costs, but it’s difficult for them to end the addiction they have to high medical cost processes.

When hospitals first bought expensive equipment in the 1960s, like Nuclear Medicine labs to blast cancer with radiation, hospitals were eager to increase utilization to increase billings.  The same is true for the replacement of $100 x-rays with $800 magnetic resonance instrument (MRI) pictures.

Healthcare providers make more money when patients are in a panic, aren’t told the costs and have a third party paying their charges.

The latest fad is “fishing trips”, where patients are given prescriptions for tests that are covered by their insurance, even when they have no symptoms. The sales pitch for this is that the patient needs to “catch” cancer early.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader