December 19, 2007
Best Book of 2007
Arnold KlingDavid Leonhardt says that it is Overtreated, by Shannon Brownlee.
it’s the natural outgrowth of our fee-for-service health care system. It turns doctors into pieceworkers, as Ms. Brownlee puts it, “paid for how much they do, not how well they care for their patients.” Doctors and hospitals typically depend on the volume of work for their income, and they are the gatekeepers who decide when work needs to be done. They also worry about being sued if they do too little. So they err on the side of overtreatment.Patients play a role, too. We’re entranced by the wonders of modern medicine and fooled by our byzantine health insurance system into thinking that we’re not really paying for all those unnecessary spinal fusions.
Unfortunately, there is no perfect alternative to fee-for-service. If you pay doctors by the patient or by outcomes rather than by the procedure, then they have an incentive to select high-quality patients.
Brownlee's book also made my list. Looking at Leonhardt's entire list, I see a few other overlaps with mine:
--Discover Your Inner Economist, by Tyler Cowen
--A Farewell to Alms, by Gregory Clark
--The Bottom Billion, by Paul Collier
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