The Cost Conundrum
Atul Gawande,
The New Yorker,
May 28, 2009
I think, looking at things from the outside, that at the same time people are beginning to question the private health care system in the U.S., other people are pushing toward replicating that system in education. This article, then should serve as a cautionary tale. "...we have to ask is whether the doctor is set up to meet the needs of the patient, first and foremost, or to maximize revenue. There is no insurance system that will make the two aims match perfectly. But having a system that does so much to misalign them has proved disastrous. As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients."
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