Obama's AMA Trip

President Obama laid out his floor plan to the AMA this morning. His reform platform has goals to reach coverage for millions of more Americans over the next few years in an attempt to spread the insurance liability. His approach is also tackles what he calls "inefficient medicine" or "wasteful spending" on items such as "EKG's" and "CT scans." He goes on to say that tests like this are often uneccessary and physicians are ordering them because he thinks doctors are getting kick backs for ordering them. I am not sure where he is recieving this information, but its far from the truth.

Doctor's order tests like EKG's and CT scans routinely for certain life threatening reasons and they are very neccessary, but there are times that you could probably get away with not ordering one because the odds are that the patient is fine. It is under those circumstances that lawyers jump right into our minds. Even if there was a 999 in 1000 chance that an EKG would most likely be normal, it is that one which ends up costing millions of dollars. Nothing in medicine is 100% and its for that reason that there are going to always be wasteful tests and procedures.

Obama either doesn't understand this yet or he doesn't care because it keeps his fellow lawyers in business. Either way it is on him to tackle reform with extreme liability and malpractice reform. If the government wants to stick their nose in this, they need to address that situation first. He needs to not only protect the people but also the physicians against this intrusion upon medical decision making.

www.politicsandmedicine.com