Last Sunday (June 2) there was
an interesting article in The New York
Times—actually, very much to the point, and too bad it never showed up
months earlier—about the crazy expensiveness of medical procedures, even relatively
routine/simple ones. It compared costs with equivalent procedures done in other
industrialized countries. U.S. costs typically were so much higher, for no
clear (or rational) reason.
One procedure it looked at was
the colonoscopy, much more expensive in the U.S. than in other countries. One
reason for the higher U.S. cost was the routine use of an anesthesiologist, for
general anesthesia. Having been the driver to take my mother to and from this
procedure at least twice in recent years, I know about the shape
and feel of this elephant of a procedure. Because general anesthesia was part
of the procedure for her (she very much wanted it), and given her
frailness, she couldn’t possibly drive herself home.
In a letter to the Times editor on about Tuesday of this
week, one man wrote that he had routinely had his colonoscopy done without
general anesthesia, and he even drove himself home.
Nice to know people can “tough”
these procedures out, and save some money (I had wisdom teeth extracted some
years ago, with no general anesthesia; I had local anesthesia; it went OK). And
as the Sunday Times piece pointed
out, insurance doesn’t necessarily cover all the cost of such routine
procedures as colonoscopies. So if you can save yourself some out-of-pocket costs, why go with
the gravy-train way of piling on the “parts” (including “general”) of the
procedure, so the resultant cost is so high?
The man who went without, and
drove himself home, could have said a colonoscopy, with himself awake through
it, was no better or worse than an average day in the office.
