Bad Medicine

Reformers have tried to solve the U.S. healthcare crisis by focusing on costs, coverage, and benefits. But this doesn't get to the heart of medicine's problem, says veteran health services consultant Lawrence J. O'Brien, who argues that the real solutions require a complete overhaul of the medical mindset of doctors and the institutions that train them. O'Brien exposes this "bad medicine" by penetrating the core issues at the center of our $1 trillion a year system: the elitist education, narrow-minded training, and egotistic "infallible" attitudes of the doctors themselves; the inverted system of health insurance; and the many costly congressional reforms that have ended in failure. He contends that medicine has gone from being general practitioner-based to being overrun by specialists who can only treat certain parts of the body, and only certain ailments, who recommend unneeded surgeries, and ignore the important questions of ethics. He also exposes the supply/demand formula within the medical system with doctors (the suppliers of healthcare) determining the demand for their services. O'Brien prescribes needed reforms to doctor education and reconstruction of the government's policies within the healthcare system to clean up the growing medical mess.