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Opportunities for the Cost Reduction of Medical Care

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Abstract

The explosion of medical knowledge has deluged the medical community with a plethora of new medicines, new tests, and new procedures. This creates a serious need to carefully evaluate the definable benefits from these new developments, which promise to increase the quality of medical care beyond older, established, and usually less-costly methods. In addition, more recent information has clearly identified genetic variation in an individual’s response to medications. As such, conventional wisdom may now prove to be wrong or subject to question. Examples of this, which we present, include situations where medication may more safely provide benefits to asymptomatic, stable patients than surgical interventions with high potential for complications that counteract predicted benefits. We argue that preventive medicine offers an unusual and comprehensive promise of disease prevention and treatment. The issues we cite may be effective in the future cost reduction of medical care.

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Notes

  1. Indeed, the ultimate high mortality from arteriosclerosis is not new knowledge. The accumulation of lipids and inflammatory cells in the walls of arteries is not newly discovered (see Anitchvov in his classic paper in 1913 followed reports by Marchand in 1904 and Ignatawsky and Neudauss in 1905 connected the relation of cholesterol to obstructive atherosclerotic vascular disease. An editorial in 1958 in the Annals of Internal Medicine by William Dock likened Anitchvov’s work as a classic discovery comparable to that of the tubercle bacillus by Koch and Harvey on the circulation [11, 12].

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. NYU Medical Center, 455 North End Avenue, #912, New York, NY, 10282, USA

    Monte Malach

  2. SUNY, Downstate, Brooklyn, NY, USA

    Monte Malach

  3. Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Henry Kaufman Management Center, New York University, 44 West Fourth Street, Suite 7-91, New York, NY, 10012, USA

    W. J. Baumol

  4. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    W. J. Baumol

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  1. Monte Malach
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  2. W. J. Baumol
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Correspondence to Monte Malach.

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Malach, M., Baumol, W.J. Opportunities for the Cost Reduction of Medical Care. J Community Health 34, 255–261 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10900-009-9155-7

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