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Category: Medical Science

Published on Monday, 02 December 2024 10:48

Written by Dr. Jane M. Orient, M.D.,

As the costs of medical care are exorbitant, I hope you are in good health. Have you ever wondered why the cost of medical care continues to escalate? There are many reasons for the staggering cost.

The graph shows the percentage of the economy devoted to the "health" sector. The red arrow shows one author's opinion of the reason for the inflection point in the 1960s: the FDA's gaining power to require proof of effectiveness as well as safety for approving a drug.

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Another major event in 1965 was the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, which dramatically increased prices of hospital services overnight. The smaller increase in the 1940s was related to the use of employer-paid health benefits to attract workers, circumventing wartime wage and price controls. Third-party payment has become increasingly predominant since then. Costs continued to increase after the "Affordable Care Act."

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The FDA's intended mission was to prevent unsafe drugs from entering the country, but Congress also gave the FDA the discretion to determine whether a drug was "effective." The FDA decided that extensive and costly data needed to be compiled. As a result, the cost of bringing a drug to market has soared (possibly 1,000-fold) and it takes almost 10 times as long to gain approval. Companies cannot afford to seek approval for drugs that will not return the investment. FDA approval allows expensive products to be sold within America's medical monopoly, which lobbyists can then get third-party payers ("insurers") to subsidize.

The 2018 Right to Try Law was an attempt to fix this issue by allowing patients in certain cases to take medications that had only undergone safety but not efficacy testing, but this did not go nearly far enough.

U.S. life expectancy and health measures are no better and sometimes worse than in nations that spend far less. A huge proportion of U.S. spending provides no benefit to patients and harms them by blocking innovation and subjecting the sick to managed-care barriers.

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The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) advocates restricting bureaucratic powers and returning control of medical spending to patients. Insurance is for reimbursing subscribers for a covered loss, not for paying "providers."

Additional Information:

·         Repurposed drugs

·         "COVID-19 and the Great Off-Label Hypocrisy"

·         Bureaucracy's role in blocking early COVID treatment

·         Healthcare Is Not an Insurable Risk

·         Recollections on the early years of Medicare

·         "White Paper on Repeal/Replacement of the Affordable Care Act"

Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989.

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She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fifth editions of Sapira's Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Wolters Kluwer. She authored books for school children, Professor Klugimkopf's Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf's Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine. 

More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and non-hazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.