I urge everyone to read the article on page E-1 of the NCTimes titled “Fine-Tuned Therapy” if you want to know why medicine is so expensive. It is on-line.
My wife just lost her school chum to brain tumor, but Palomar Hospital has one of only two or three special machines in the country that could have saved her – and it cost $4.5 million! I wish I had know it was available a few months ago…there is another at Duke Medical Center.
Treatment with this miracle machine is covered by Medicare, but what ever the payment system it would cost a semi-fortune for each treatment. It is out-patient treatment…get it and drive home!
A five-way heart by-pass is just “meatball surgery” – done daily at Palomar by a surgeon who has been doing it for 30 years and for which the surgeon is paid $2,000 (less than a Major League closer gets per pitch!), but new medical technology is expensive, and becomes obsolete quickly.
Reducing medical expenses while covering more people is a fools-errand.
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