Americans may need less health care than they think.
 | By Honor Jones Cover Stories Editor |
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My baby wasn’t eating. She had a fever. Day 4, Day 5, Day 6 — it wasn’t coming down. Was it the coronavirus? She wasn’t coughing or congested, but who knows? It was April in Pennsylvania, still early in the lockdown. If she didn’t already have the virus, the last thing I wanted to do was expose her to it in the petri dish of a pediatric doctor’s office. |
But she was in pain, so I took her in. And good thing I did: She had a urinary tract infection and needed antibiotics. I felt like a terrible mother for not getting her treated earlier. My only comfort was that I wasn’t alone in delaying treatment. |
Since the pandemic began, millions of checkups and surgeries have been canceled or postponed. We’ve published many Op-Eds mentioning the risks involved. How many cancers are going undiagnosed? How many heart attacks untreated? |
But today, Sandeep Jauhar — a cardiologist and one of our frequent writers — offers a somewhat different take. He points to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll in which 86 percent of respondents said they were about as healthy as before the pandemic. Only 1 in 10 reported that their health, or that of a family member, had been hurt by delayed care. |
That’s … surprising. One explanation, says Sandeep: People don’t need as much health care as they think they do. |
“A substantial amount of health care in America is wasteful,” he writes. In some specialties, up to a fifth of surgeries may be unnecessary. Overtreatment is driven by doctors’ fears of lawsuits, patients’ fears of uncertainty and the “belief that newer, more expensive technology is always better.” |
Plus, elective procedures stuff a lot of money into our health care system’s insatiable maw. |
Surely, the lag in care will cause many people with minor complaints (like my poor baby!) to suffer longer than they need to. Surely others will face life-threatening illnesses that should have been caught earlier. But Sandeep made me wonder if some patients could actually be better off, by avoiding the pain and complications of a pointless procedure. |
“If your surgery was postponed because of the pandemic, it is worth having a conversation with your doctor about whether it is still needed,” Sandeep suggests. Sometimes things “get better by themselves.” |
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