30% of all healthcare spending is waste...$750B a year..more than the military budget

[basselope]

4. Slow down there a little bit.

There is a lot that is true and a lot that STILL NEEDS TIME.

Yes, doctors go to antibiotics far too quickly, which causes all types of problems... but many of the scans and tests that do nothing beneficial are often to be extra cautious.

My wife was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma in November. Caught VERY early (stage 1A). Why? Because even though her blood test was absolutely clear, our doctor decided to order a fine needle aspiration test on a swollen lymph node in her neck, that he strongly suspected would show nothing. But, it came back "inconclusive". Doctor still suspected it was nothing (because the blood tests were so clean and she had 0 secondary symptoms), BUT he recommended a biopsy to be safe (which was a full surgical procedure). The surgeon said he was 90% sure it was nothing. Well, as you can guess, it wasn't nothing.

Before starting Chemo she had to take several tests.. even the doctor said they were "probably unnecessary, but better to be safe than sorry".. this included a bone marrow biopsy. Given her stage it was incredibly unlikely the disease had made it into the bone marrow, but on the off chance it had, she suggested the test. Luckily, it was negative.

After 2 rounds of ABVD chemo she got a clean CT scan last week. Just finished 1, hopefully, final round of ABVD and they have scheduled another scan. Probably unnecessary since the last one just 2 weeks ago was negative, but they want to be sure before officially stopping treatment.

Now, if her inflamed lymph node had turned out to be what the doctor original expected, just a leftover gift from a bad cold she had a couple of months before... she would be a statistic in the "unnecessary test". The bone marrow biopsy turned out to be unnecessary as the doctor suspected... this next scan is probably unnecessary. But, there is a world in which you are far better to be safe than sorry!

My other issue is that we wouldn't necessarily be seeing major results from just 25 years of better scanning (and it is actually far less than that, as the more advanced scans and tests have only come out in past 5-10 years). These are results we can't measure for decades.

So yes, is there room for improvement? For sure. But, when I hear this stuff I think of Trump saying "waste, fraud and abuse" as his solution for everything.

I've known personally too many cases of doctors being too dismissive of patients and having the worst happen to start looking for ways to force them to cut back on (I believe) they believe is helpful treatments. Better education.. better testing methods, yes. However, as my wife has gone through her chemo she met someone whose mother died after her 5th ABVD treatment, because she developed a cough (which is a common side effect from one of the drugs). The doctor didn't want to prescribe an antibiotic. After the weekend the cough got worse and she went back in and unfortunately, it was now pneumonia and had gone sepsis. She was dead within 12 hours. Had the doctor given her the antibiotic on Friday, she likely would be alive today.

So, yes, there is an issue here, but lets be VERY CAREFUL in how we approach it, because people's lives are literally at stake.