Page 100 - Cityview Jan-Feb 2017

98JANUARY FEBRUARY 2017AGING SPOTLIGHTUNNECESSARY HEALTHCARE COSTS care something we all wish to avoid. However, we don’t want to putthe quality of our care at risk by doing so. This conundrum is at the heart of the healthcare dilemma in the United States. Simply said, we want the best healthcare and we want to be ableto a ord it without going down theroad of socialized medicine. If we’re going to do that, we have to gure out how to improve care and cut costswhile working with most of the same institutions we have today, including Medicare. How can we really discern the necessary from the unnecessary without panicking about which is which and without in the process reducing quality?Medicare bundling addresses the concern of cost-cutting directly byBy Tomi L. Wileyeliminating the current fee-for-service model of paying providers. As for the second concern, advocates make the claim that bundling values quality over quantity of services provided. The bundling approach views healthcare through the lens of the entire scopeof a patient’s treatment rather thanas a series of discrete treatments for particular symptoms. Ideally, this would work. But the world of healthcare is not an ideal place.Healthcare itself has recently been in something of a transitional period in the United States. The A ordable Care Act has o ered an expansionof government assistance, and thankfully, an increasing numberof people have been able to a ord medical services. This, of course, comes with an uptick in the number of people taking advantage of theirnewfound medical care and treatment options—which understandably puts more stress on doctors, but also allows for the healthcare industry to raise unnecessary costs.A 2014 Harvard study of morethan a million Medicare patients found that, at minimum, one infour patients received unnecessary treatments. That amounts to roughly $8.5 billion in unnecessary costs.The study concluded that some ofthe contributing factors to these unnecessary procedures were patient demand, physician fear of malpractice suits, and greed. Baby Boomers, the second most populous generation in our country’s history, have started to reach retirement age, with thousands of people hitting that marker every day. They are met by rising costs in healthcare, as well as some uctuationTo Treat or Not to TreatWho should be in charge of choosing your care?