The Washington Post, under the headline “A Case of Getting What You Pay For”, reports:
The evolution of heart attack treatment over the past three decades is a story of doing more things to more people at greater expense with better results. It is a portrait in miniature of medicine in the United States.
Although inappropriate care, high administrative costs, inflated prices and fraud all add to the country’s gigantic medical bill, the biggest driver of the upward curve of health spending has been the discovery of new and better things to do when someone gets sick.
“Money matters in health care as it does in few other industries,” wrote Harvard University health economist David Cutler in 2004. “Where we have spent a lot, we have received a lot in return.”
Beyond heart attack treatment, similar stories can be told about cancer, premature birth, arthritis, HIV infection, mental illness and innumerable other common conditions. The trend in all of them toward more intensive, expensive and better treatment is not likely to change with health-care reform, however constituted.
Providing health insurance to the 47 million Americans who don’t have it — the key feature of the bills before Congress — is likely to expand heart attack treatment and increase spending on it, not pare it back and reduce the cost.
(Via Kausfiles, via Instapundit.)
Pay more to get more? Who ever heard of such a thing?
Internet Scofflaw 