High Costs of Health Care

I just finished reading the well-publicized article in the New Yorker that focused on McClellan, Texas, where the average cost of health care per person ($15,000) which was $3,000 more than the average per capita income!  This study contrasted McClellan with a neighboring city (El Paso) as well as other organizations, e.g., Mayo Clinic, and states, e.g., California.

While other studies convinced me that the high costs of medical care were attributed to useless new drugs and  medical devices, this article brings to bear physicians in some areas see medicine as a source of increasing revenue. Quantity trumps quality, since the high costs of care do not correlate with better outcomes. 

Even though the evidence is clear, the author admits the difficulty in promoting models of collaboration and shared revenue to promote quality of care. Whether the government or private insurers fund health care, the evidence indicates that there is no difference in array of different costs. In short, unless physicians can see medicine as primarily a service to people without consideration of improving their levels of income, there will be a problem in the level of health care costs.