High Cost of the Best Healthcare

“How Many Doctors Should Be Blamed?” (Oct. 23) is one of those unfortunate stories that dramatizes the human suffering of one apparent victim of medical malpractice without taking into account the broader issues of healthcare in our country.

As a radiologist in Thousand Oaks, I see the high end of medical practice. We are in a well-to-do area and we have contracts with very few HMOs.

If Robyn Libitsky had come to us, it is highly likely that the physicians in charge of her care would have ordered a battery of studies, most likely culminating in an MRI scan, and she would have very quickly, perhaps even on the first day of her visit, had her cancer discovered.

The flip side of all of that, however, is that there are a great many other patients with similar complaints of back pain who also have a battery of tests ordered, and most of these studies are either negative or do not lead to any difference in the outcome for the patient’s back pain.

I am acutely aware, as I go through these studies, that we are all contributing to the high cost of healthcare.

The vast majority of people who have back pain have only disc or other degenerative joint disease in the spine. And the majority of this type of spine problem will get better after about a month or so with just some rest and analgesics. Doing extensive tests on people who will get well on their own is a waste of money.

This was why the doctors at Kaiser treated Robyn Libitsky the way they did.

Kaiser health insurance is much cheaper than fee-for-service insurance. The reason is that they save lots of money by developing specific protocols for dealing with common diseases.

Inevitably, this means denying adequate healthcare to a few unfortunate patients.

Dr. Golden Pan

Thousand Oaks