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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (7895)	7/30/2009 2:28:43 PM
From: skinowski	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

To prove my observation that many hospital admissions are unnecessary would not be an easy task. "Social scientists" would go ahead and examine thousands of records, and they would come out satisfied that the admissions - vast majority, anyway - were justified. However, after decades of working with "third party payers", everyone in the field is an expert at using all the correct buzzwords, and could plausibly "justify" just about anything (on paper). You would need a group of credible researchers working with several anonymous reporters who make a living working ER's and/or are hospital-based, in different parts of the country. There would be a fair amount of subjectivity in the raw data - but I believe that with a large enough group of participants many of the individual biases would wash each other out. Something similar could be designed to study the real costs of defensive medicine in outpatient settings, I suspect that the results would be shocking - just as you said, going into 100's of billions.