| What US Health Care Needs |
| from the velluvial-matrix dept. |
| posted by kdawson on Monday June 21, @02:15 (Medicine) |
| https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/06/20/2326207/What-US-Health-Care-Needs |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Medical doctor and writer Atul Gawande gave the commencement address
recently at Stanford's School of Medicine. In it he lays out very
precisely and in a nonpartisan way [0]what is wrong with the institution
of medical care in the US â€" why it is both so expensive and so
ineffective at delivering quality care uniformly across the board. "Half
a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then,
however, science has... enumerated and identified... more than 13,600
diagnoses â€" 13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one
we've discovered beneficial remedies... But those remedies now include
more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical
procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this
capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time,
without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we're
struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different
service lines to deliver. ... And then there is the frightening federal
debt we will face. By 2025, we will owe more money than our economy
produces. One side says war spending is the problem, the other says it's
the economic bailout plan. But take both away and you've made almost no
difference. Our deficit problem â€" far and away â€" is the soaring and
seemingly unstoppable cost of health care. ... Like politics, all
medicine is local. Medicine requires the successful function of systems â€"
of people and of technologies. Among our most profound difficulties is
making them work together. If I want to give my patients the best care
possible, not only must I do a good job, but a whole collection of
diverse components must somehow mesh effectively. ... This will take
science. It will take art. It will take innovation. It will take
ambition. And it will take humility. But the fantastic thing is: This is
what you get to do."
Discuss this story at:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/06/20/2326207
Links:
0. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/06/gawande-stanford-speech.html
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