The Health Care Bill has passed...

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by AOII Angel

This is what is wrong with medicine in a lot of ways now days. Medicine is NOT an exact science. When patients come to the ER complaining of cough, fatigue and chills, the ER doctor SHOULD think viral infection, NOT Cancer. Yes, the patient could have lymphoma or leukemia, but these are called Zebra diagnoses. We are not supposed to be chasing after zebras when horses are so much more common. When the patient comes back with the same symptoms a month later, THEN you do the work-up for Cancer. The doctor didn't MISS the diagnosis of cancer. It isn't MALPRACTICE. If we take every single patient with vague symptoms and do multi-million dollar work-ups, we will NEVER decrease the cost of health care in this nation.

If that's the mentality docs are approaching their craft with, then they really need to get educated on what constitutes malpractice. Missing an obscure diagnosis when more obvious symptoms were presented in an ER setting is almost never going to be malpractice. Doing a CT in that case, or treating anything beyond an acceptable minimum just opens the door to other sorts of medical errors.

Do you think part of this 'defensive medicine' aspect is really that hospitals and certain practices want to conduct as many expensive procedures as possible in order to bill health insurance companies/medicare for more services delivered?

I know that the practice of law is often handled that way -- especially by insurance defense firms. They do an excellent job at billing that file. Most of them bill by the hour, and there's a saying about those guys that you'll never be deposed by an insurance defense attorney. . . because there's never just an insurance defense attorney there. They invariably send 2-3 lawyers (or more) to sit and bill their full hourly rates for listening to another lawyer conduct a deposition... but I digress.