Unnecessary Medical Expenses

Introduction

The United States uses nearly $9,000 per capita on healthcare expenditures, which is significantly more than all other countries. Why do we spend so much more when our quality doesn’t even compete? Several medical examinations and procedures performed on patients are completely unnecessary. For example, some women have a specific date to which they would like to give birth, so they will request an early elective delivery. An early elective delivery is labor that is induced between 37 and 39 weeks of pregnancy, and is also induced without any legitimate medical need. These types of deliveries cause a lot of infants to be admitted into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). These incidents could be completely avoided if physicians would keep woman from requesting premature labor.

Literature Review

In the 1970’s, John Wennberg noticed that there was a major variation in the cost of medical procedures around the different regions of the United States. In 2008, end-of-life care per Medicare beneficiary in the state of New Jersey was $59,379 and $32,523 per beneficiary in North Dakota (Wennberg, 2008). Unfortunately, no relation of higher spending and quality of care was evident. So to explain this phenomenon, one must further explore medical procedures that may not be necessary. Several groups of people are affected by this issue in the U.S, but the main group is the elderly mostly because of their higher need for medical attention and the inevitable end-of-life care. Since the expenditures vary state by state, one good way to improve the overall average is to find the best cost and quality based on mortality of all hospitals. Consequently, if all hospitals would imitate the strategies of the hospital with the highest ...

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...nted if the healthcare system as a whole reforms to a patient and physician friendly system.

Works Cited

Baicker, & Chandra. (2004). Medicare spending, the physician workforce, and beneficiaries’ quality of care. Health Affairs (Millwood), 184-197.

Fisher, Wennberg, Stukel, Gottlieb, Lucas, & Pinder. (2003). The implications of regional variations in Medicare spending. Part 1: The content, quality, and accessibility of care. Annals of Internal Medicine., 273-287.

O’Connor, Llewellyn-Thomas, & Flood. (2004). Modifying unwarranted variations in health care: Shared decision making using patient decision aids. Health Affairs (Millwood), 63-72.

Wennberg. (September 17, 2007). The Deep Dive. DMAA Annual Meeting;, 50-62.

Yasaitis, Fisher, Skinner, & Chandra. (2009). Hospital quality and intensity of spending: Is there an association? Health Affairs (Millwood), 566-572.