Money and Managed Care

Managed Care It seems that in today's technologically rich world with the abundance of resources available to mankind that our collective health should be in a much better state. Despite the massive amounts of money spent towards finding cures to man's ills, the chronic illnesses such as cancer and diabetes continue to grow and trouble the people of our society.

Managed care therefore must be investigated as a root cause of the failures of today's medical profession in an honest and frank manner if any true understanding of what is happening may occur. The purpose of this essay is to discuss how managed care has fallen desperately short in its aims to control medical costs, and in fact will be highlighted as a main cause for the problem itself. Overtreatment The idea of profit for health care has caused serious conflicts of interest within the practice of modern medicine.

The Hippocratic Oath provides the necessary guidance in administering medicine but the idea of healing in our society ignores many tenants of the idea. The oath reads "I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism." The idea of overtreatment needs to be serious addressed when contemplating the massive amounts of money and resources that our collective nation spends on healing our illnesses.

Pope (2012) agreed with this ides when she wrote "but an epidemic of overtreatment -- too many scans, too many blood tests, too many procedures -- is costing the nation's health care system at least $210 billion a year, according to the Institute of Medicine, and taking a human toll in pain, emotional suffering, severe complications and even death." It appears that it is possible that we are trying too hard and not letting natural processes take over.

The Source of Healing Healing comes from the individual in many cases where traumatic injury is not present. The day-to-day process of living should incorporate individual responsibility to maintaining a high level of health, both physical and mental. In all actuality people must heal themselves of poor health behaviors if any progress can be made. The source of healing is an internal process at the core and medicine has been relegated to simply treating the symptoms of the problem and not the root causes.

Sherman (2012) suggested that healthcare needs to shun some of its responsibility and allow people to make more proactive decisions regarding their health care choices. He wrote "patients share some of the blame for often demanding that doctors do something, anything, to make them feel better. It is easy for a patient who is covered by insurance to get pulled into this "therapeutic cascade." It usually starts with screening and frequently leads to more tests, and often unnecessary medical procedures and drugs.

Sometimes people just need to be told to stop smoking, lose weight and exercise." Eliminating Waste By Increasing Quality Waste and wonton abuse of the medical insurance system is prevalent in so many areas of the managed care industry that is difficult to locate where to begin to address the problem with a solution that is not based on identifying root causes. The recent events point towards even more managing by the Affordable Care Act.

This new policy has created new opportunities for waste by having the federal government take it upon themselves to employ stricter rules and even more micro managing. Eliminating waste requires less action and not more as counter intuitive as that may seem, in many aspects. It appears that the system is overloaded and throwing more money at the system, while demonstrated fully, does not really help the problem in the long-term. Quality and not quantity needs.