Preventive Care Is Bad Business
Ian Urbina writes in The New York Times about another dumb facet of the way we run our health care in this country: how drastic health measures are covered for diabetics; just not preventive care:
With much optimism, Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan opened its new diabetes center in March 1999. Miss America, Nicole Johnson Baker, herself a diabetic, showed up for promotional pictures, wearing her insulin pump.In one photo, she posed with a man dressed as a giant foot - a comical if dark reminder of the roughly 2,000 largely avoidable diabetes-related amputations in New York City each year. Doctors, alarmed by the cost and rapid growth of the disease, were getting serious.
At four hospitals across the city, they set up centers that featured a new model of treatment. They would be boot camps for diabetics, who struggle daily to reduce the sugar levels in their blood. The centers would teach them to check those levels, count calories and exercise with discipline, while undergoing prolonged monitoring by teams of specialists.
But seven years later, even as the number of New Yorkers with Type 2 diabetes has nearly doubled, three of the four centers, including Beth Israel's, have closed.
They did not shut down because they had failed their patients. They closed because they had failed to make money. They were victims of the byzantine world of American health care, in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications.
Insurers, for example, will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000.
Patients have trouble securing a reimbursement for a $75 visit to the nutritionist who counsels them on controlling their diabetes. Insurers do not balk, however, at paying $315 for a single session of dialysis, which treats one of the disease's serious complications.
Not surprising, as the epidemic of Type 2 diabetes has grown, more than 100 dialysis centers have opened in the city.
"It's almost as though the system encourages people to get sick and then people get paid to treat them," said Dr. Matthew E. Fink, a former president of Beth Israel.
This mirrors psychiatry, which, as Martin Seligman observed at the recent Milton J. Erickson Evolution of Psychiatry Conference, has taken a disorders approach to mental health care, rather than striving to make healthy, high-functioning people better -- which just doesn't pay.
The problem with preventative care is that it requires a change of behavior in the patient, who often has no incentive to change until they get sick. I guess you could impose a fat tax, but I doubt that will work any better than the tax on cigarrettes.
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