October 4th, 2007
Today's Debate: Is the cost villain really tech?
Was it something I said?
All of a sudden medical device makers are feeling some serious heat. As the AdvaMed meetings in Washington moved yesterday from the trade show to the issues conference, a lot of people were getting quite defensive.
“You might hear medical technology cast as a villain in the debate over health care costs,” Sleep Solutions Inc. chief executive Michael Thomas told reporters. You think, with a $1,200 bill for snoring? (They also make this lovely device for qualifying people to have oxygen in the home.)
Medtech is never advanced if it doesn’t address costs, writes Patrick Driscol. of MedMarket Intelligence Diligence, who then goes on to explain how expensive laporascopies and stents are really cheap, when compared to their benefits.
I don’t argue with him. And hospital gear is not the only culprit in raising health care costs. Care for the uninsured is part of it. Paperwork is part of it. Sterility, which means everything is use-once and toss in the hazardous waste bin, even plays a role.
The biggest cause of health care inflation, I would submit, is pharmaceuticals. We don’t just have a pill for everything, we have a pill to prevent everything. And those pills are ferociously expensive until they go off-patent. Healthy people with $100/month co-pays for medicine? That’s some serious cost.
In fact, every part of the health care industry can play the old Family Circus gremlin“not me.” When in fact it’s everyone, taken together, driving costs ever-higher, with extended life as an absolute value and no serious pressure to analyze costs in light of that.
I will say this again. Every society has this problem. Whether we’re all about the insurance, use a single payer, or have a hybrid system, costs continue to rise. The industry calls this “growth.” But when you sell me a car I can haul goods to market in it. I can’t do that if you sell me a pill.
Really hard questions aren’t even being asked amid all the finger-pointing, but the campaign season has just begun, so get used to it.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to ZDNet Healthcare via Email alerts or RSS.
| 10/04/07
