Experts talking about medical care
The current New England Journal of Medicine has a couple of publicly available pieces online to which I thought I'd draw your attention.
"I went to medical school. I'm loaded with debt. I've got an office full of people pushing paperwork every day. I don't have time to talk to anybody. No one in Washington seems to care what I think. I can't function this way. I don't get reimbursed enough."
"Unless we do more fundamental surgery on making primary care a more compelling field, I think in the future primary care will be practiced by others than doctors."
"If there's one lesson that we've learned about health reform in the last few decades, [it's that] being right doesn't count for very much. ... if we're going to fight this battle for health reform on moral grounds, we're going to lose."
A panel of distinguished physicians and professors discusses some of the issues surrounding health-care costs for Americans. Excerpts, with links to video, are here.
How cost-effective is vaccinating girls and young women against human papilloma virus (the virus implicated in cervical cancer)? Some research is here. There's a term in the piece, "quality-adjusted life-year," that isn't fully explained, but medical treatments are often rated in terms of cost per quality-adjusted life-year. That cost for the HPV vaccine is $43,600 in some populations. That sounds like a lot, but the same cost for some commonly drugs tops $500,000.
