Health care costs – have we picked all the low hanging fruit?

[Guest guest]

Health care costs – have we picked all the low hanging fruit?

>

> By Kate Benson / Reporting on Health

> April 15, 2012

>

> In an era of " modern " medicine it sometimes seems as if many of the

> biggies have been knocked out compared to centuries past. The

> previously untreatable has become treatable and in many cases

> preventable. Tuberculosis? Check. AIDS? Check. Heart disease? Check.

> And with knowledge can come lower societal costs as well as health

> care cost containment.

>

> But what about patients with rarer or more complex or even contested

> diseases where researchers have very different viewpoints and

> ideological stances leading to highly conflicting literature and

> research funds are distributed unevenly between the different points

> of view?

>

> What about diseases where the usual prescription, whether behavioral

> or pharmaceutical, isn't effective even if it may be " cost effective? "

> What about the indirect economic costs associated with rising

> disability linked to diseases we don't yet know how to treat

> effectively in the majority of cases?

>

> In, " CFS: One Disease and Its Costs, " PBS broadcaster Llewellyn King

> ledes with, " What would happen to health care if a million new

> patients with just one of many now incurable and largely untreated

> diseases flooded the system, relying on medicine that could cost

> $70,000? " Mr. King argues that this might not be a bad thing. (The

> current cost to the U.S. economy is estimated at $25 billion annually

> for direct medical costs and lost productivity.)

>

> Although Mr. King addresses one relatively rare disease where the

> " usual " isn't working very well, there are many others such as Gulf

> War Illness, atypical MS, Lyme Disease or the autism spectrum for

> example.

>

> Are they at the top of most journalists' list to write about given the

> smaller populations they effect and how complicated and polarized the

> topic may be? Probably not, but these diseases, like cancer and AIDS

> before them, they may be bell weathers of where health policy and

> medicine are failing and where both the costs and the human toll are

> rising.