Posted 3/13/2010 04:04:00 PM by Douglas

How many times have you heard this one before? Your friend's car is making a funny noise, so they take it to the shop and the mechanic tells them it's going to cost $2,300 to fix whatever's wrong with it. So they take it somewhere else where they give it a can of STP and a new air freshener and it's fine. They come back cussing about those crooked mechanics and how they're just ripping people off left and right just because they have a boat payment due.

Yet, these same people will not hesitate for a second to submit to anything a person in a white coat tells them to.

Americans, including the commander in chief, need to realize that "more care is not necessarily better care," wrote cardiologist Dr. Rita Redberg, editor of Archives of Internal Medicine. She was commenting on Obama's recent physical.

This really has nothing to do with Obama, but sums up perfectly what's wrong with the insurance-backed health care system. The doctors have absolutely NO incentive not to dispense every single avenue of treatment and diagnosis, as long as the insurance company is paying for it.

Doctors also often order tests or procedures to protect themselves against lawsuits — so-called defensive medicine — and also because the fee-for-service system compensates them for it, said Dr. Gilbert Welch, a Dartmouth University internist and health outcomes researcher.

Sure, there's the legal aspect in that they don't want to be sued, but how much of it is a doctor covering his ass and how much is it billing the insurance company for another thousand dollars that's really unnecessary? Are you going to question his judgment? You don't know any more about what his differential diagnosis than you do the timing for '78 Mustang. So we trust them, and sometimes, we get screwed, but guess what? We all pay for it.