What's Wrong w/America's Healthcare/How to Fix It | Arthritis Information

 

To be televised on PBS program, "Bill Moyer's Journal," Friday night, August 28. Check local listing for time.

MONEY DRIVEN MEDICINE: What's Wrong with America's Health Care and How to Fix It

"The film MONEY-DRIVEN MEDICINE reveals how a profit-hungry medical-industrial complex has turned health care into a system that squanders millions of dollars on unnecessary tests, unproven and sometimes unwanted procedures and overpriced prescription drugs. Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney has teamed up with producers Peter Bull, Chris Matonti, and director Andy Fredericks to produce a film based on Maggie Mahar's powerful book MONEY-DRIVEN MEDICINE.

After covering the health care industry for years as a financial journalist, Mahar wanted to write a book examining the system from the perspective of doctors and patients. The response from the doctors she contacted was overwhelming — five out of six called her back. The film brings their stories to the screen, portraying an industry where corporate profits often get in the way of care."

The film can also be viewed online after the broadcast Friday night and the transcript will be available after the broadcast and can be read at the website below:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08282009/profile.html

To see a trailer of the film:

http://www.moneydrivenmedicine.org/
Thats pretty funny. Bill Moyer ??? LBJ's henchman from years gone by. Biggest far left liberal Democrat you could find. I wonder if he will agree with the President on health care? [QUOTE=6t5frlane]Thats pretty funny. Bill Moyer ??? LBJ's henchman from years gone by. Biggest far left liberal Democrat you could find. I wonder if he will agree with the President on health care? [/QUOTE]

Century Foundation fellow Maggie Mahar is the author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Healthcare Costs So Much, published in 2006.

A former financial journalist for Institutional Investor, The New York Times, Barron's and Bloomberg, Mahar writes the Healthbeat blog, a Century Foundation project. She has also contributed to Dartmouth Medicine, covering Medicare spending and the possibility of reform.

Money-Driven Medicine argues that, over the past century, the history of U.S. health care has been shaped by corporate interests' gradual encroachment on physician autonomy. According to Mahar, this has produced a system of costly and inefficient competition among providers, leaving Americans worse off than citizens of other industrialized nations.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111063048

 

[QUOTE=Joie]<> [/QUOTE] <>

If you are adverse to watching PBS tv, information about this film based on Maggie Mahar's book, can be obtained at this website: 

http://moneydrivenmedicine.org/

A SYNOPSIS OF THE FILM

Money-Driven Medicine provides the essential introduction Americans need to become knowledgeable participants in healthcare reform, now and in the years ahead. Produced by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and based on Maggie Mahar's acclaimed book, Money Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much, the film offers a behind-the-scenes look at how our 2.6 trillion dollar a year healthcare system went so terribly wrong and what it will take to fix it.

The U.S. spends twice as much per person on healthcare as the average developed nation, fully one-sixth of our GDP - yet our outcomes, especially for chronic diseases, are very often worse. What makes us different? The U.S. is the only industrialized nation that has chosen to turn medicine into a largely unregulated, for-profit business.

Effective Care or More Expensive Care

In Money-Driven Medicine, Dr. Donald Berwick, president of the Institute for Health Care Improvement, explains: “We get more care, but not better care.” Our fee-for-service system channels resources into the high-tech, high-cost “rescue care” patients need after they become critically ill, while it skimps on the preventive primary care which could keep them out of the hospital in the first place. As a consequence, emergency rooms overflow while family practitioners are becoming an endangered species. Medical students explain that these perverse pay incentives drive them away from primary care into higher-paying specialties.

Medical ethicist Larry Churchill doesn’t mince words: “The current medical care system is not designed to meet the health needs of the population. It is designed to protect the interests of insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, and to a certain extent organized medicine. It is designed to turn a profit. It is designed to meet the needs of the people in power.”

These businesses comprise the “medical-industrial complex” which has wrested power from physicians, turning healthcare into a commodity and patients into profit centers. As the eye-opening ads in Money-Driven Medicine reveal, the more new drugs, surgical procedures, diagnostic devices and hospital beds the health industry can produce, the more they can sell - whether we need them or not. It’s called “supply-driven demand” and it’s possible because a sick person can’t say no.

Although many uninsured and underinsured Americans receive too little care, the well-insured often get unnecessary, even risky care. More than two decades of studies by researchers at Dartmouth reveal that one-third of our healthcare dollars are squandered on useless tests and ineffective or unproven procedures no better than the less-costly ones they replace. The studies demonstrate that evidence-based, accountable care would be both more effective and less expensive.

Taking Back Healthcare

In Money-Driven Medicine frustrated doctors and outraged patients testify to the tragedies which can happen when profit trumps patients’ needs. Veteran physicians stress that reform must begin with a new doctor-patient partnership based on consistent, informed, shared decision-making. “Before patients can reclaim their rightful place at the center of our healthcare system,” Maggie Mahar notes, “we must empower doctors and nurses to practice patient-centered care based, not on corporate imperatives, but on the best scientific research available.”

Money-Driven Medicine will encourage health professionals and patients to work together to take control of American medicine back from the MBAs. The film will alert viewers that universal coverage is just the first step in a long and arduous battle for comprehensive reform continuing well after whatever bill Congress passes this Fall. We have seen that the industry’s lobbyists will resist every measure aimed at cost-containment and results-based care.

Screening Money-Driven Medicine will help viewers distinguish between structural change and sham reform. It will convince them that a sound, sustainable medical infrastructure is crucial not just to their personal futures but to the economy and society as a whole - why curing America’s healthcare crisis could be a matter of national life and death.

 

[QUOTE=JasmineRain] [QUOTE=6t5frlane]Thats pretty funny. Bill Moyer ??? LBJ's henchman from years gone by. Biggest far left liberal Democrat you could find. I wonder if he will agree with the President on health care? [/QUOTE]

Maybe a better story from ole Bill would be to explain why ( working for LBJ )he sought information from the FBI on the sexual preferences of white house staff members in 64.....Oh Billy you kinky devil you and to think you are a Baptist minister An interview with MAGGIE MAHAR, author of "Money-Driven Medicine" and Oscar-winning filmmaker, Alex Gibney, whose film is based on Mahar's book.  Joie2009-08-28 14:35:58

'Perverse' Incentives Examined in New Health Care Documentary

'Money Driven Medicine' Claims Health Care Industry Is Driven by Profit

. . . As the Sept. 15 due date set by President Obama for health care reform approaches, the raging debate has both Democratic and Republican lawmakers encountering town hall meetings that often turn into free-for-alls . . . Amidst the finger pointing and the shouting comes a quiet new documentary that offers another diagnosis of what's ailing the country's health care system. The documentary is called "Money Driven Medicine." , who wrote the book that inspired the film, says the root of the problem is that the health care system has become profit driven. In an interview with "Nightline" anchor Terry Moran, Mahar said, "What I learned, knowing Wall Street pretty well, is that our health care system was profit driven. Those people who made money on the health care system were really in charge." . . . . According to these doctors, it's the treatments, test, surgeries and pills that get paid for, not healthy results. That in turn creates what (filmamker) Gibney calls "supply driven demand, meaning, the more supply you create, the more people demand. And the way it works is this: If you have five big MRI machines in your hospital, next thing you know, there are pressures on the doctors in the hospital -- 'Well, you know, how about another MRI, let's take a look at that.' "And next thing you know, the MRI machines are being used around the clock," added Gibney. "But you don't always need an MRI -- a good orthopedist can kind of feel your knee or look at an X-ray, which is cheaper, and figure out what's going on much more simply." "The financial incentives are perverse. We pay doctors for doing more. What we should be doing is paying them for the quality, for better outcomes, for effective care. Instead, we're paying them for quantity," Mahar further explained. Dr. Andrey Espinoza, an interventional cardiologist, shared his views in the documentary. "What I miss most is the ability to sit in a room and talk with a patient for an hour. You see somebody for 15 minutes, 15 minutes is a long time these days. Basically, you get on the assembly line," he said.

And that assembly line is driven, the film argues, by a profit incentive that pays for simply doing things to people rather than making sure they are well. And, as the movie shows, more and more doctors are branching out -- becoming part owners of the hospitals and testing centers they send patients to -- a potentially sharp conflict of interest.

But Mahar thinks that most doctors aren't susceptible to the naked greed depicted in Gibney's Enron film; in the health care system that has developed in the United States, it's more insidious. "Most doctors are doing the best they can for their patient. But you've got all these other pressures, the drug makers, the device makers, trying to sell them the most expensive drug and device. You've got a hospital that wants them to do as many tests and procedures as possible because that's how the hospital stays in the black." . . .

Though Gibney and Mahar do not take a specific stand on the contentious issues in the health care debate, the emotional stories the movie tells -- a doctor whose daughter is stricken with leukemia, a woman whose husband is terribly burned -- point to one big idea.

"The more that patients are involved with their own health care, by mandate, or because they're working with good doctors, they actually make really good, informed decisions that are more frugal than the decisions made by insurance companies," said Gibney.

"I think if we actually take health care and put it back in the hands of the patients and the doctors, instead of the insurance companies and the manufacturers, we're going to be a lot better off," he added.

TO READ COMPLETE ARTICLE SEE ABC NEWS:

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Story?id=8313170&page=1

I plan on watching it because I worked in the healthcare field both in nursing and administration and then the health insurance industry for many years until I retired.  I know what goes on, why and how in both industries.   It will be an interesting couple of hours and I'll probably agree with much of it.  Thanks for posting Joie because there will be many people on the forum who will watch it.  Lindy
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