Defensive Medicine - It Gets Expensive
Have you ever gotten sick or hurt, visited your doctor, particularly a specialist, or even landed in the emergency room, then undergone a series of medical tests without really understanding what they were all for?
CT scans, MRIs, EKGs, PET scans… names we hear for tests we may be unfamiliar with. And they are all so expensive! Even with insurance, we can look at our statements and see what they cost. If our symptoms or diagnoses are at all frightening, we just don’t seem to ask many questions about medical tests.
Would it surprise you to learn that maybe you didn’t need all those tests? That the doctor requested them not for you, but for him?
A survey in 2005 revealed that 93 percent of doctors have ordered tests, not to diagnose a patient, but to cover their own backsides. If that doctor treated you, and you ran into a problem later, he would need to prove he had done his job well. Producing results from that barrage of tests might get him off the hook.
Yes, it seems that an eventual malpractice lawsuit is the impetus for ordering so many tests. The fear of lawyers and large settlements has created the practice of “defensive medicine.”
You know, if I were a doctor, I would order extra tests, too. Malpractice suits, regardless of whether they are warranted, cost billions of dollars each year. Even the very best doctors who never make mistakes pay tens of thousands each year in premiums for malpractice insurance. In some specialties, those premiums are even higher. One way they can keep their malpractice insurance costs lower is to order all those tests. We really can’t blame them.
On the other hand, guess who is paying for those tests? We are! For each dollar spent on unnecessary testing or any other unnecessary service your doctor my order, you pay a portion of it, either in next year’s premium, or in next year’s taxes for Medicare or other government insurance programs. One estimate tells us that these unneeded tests are costing payers almost $130 billion per year. In fact, that is money coming out of our pockets.
There are steps we can take to be sure we are getting the tests we need, and not getting too many tests we don’t need. We’ll cover them in my next column.
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