Pet Peeves: antibiotics for short term, ostensibly viral diseases -- bronchitis, sinusitis, nasopharyngitis or otitis media; half of abdominal CT scans or the half of back MRIs that show bulging disks on persons sans back pain. Who's failure is it to not control costs?

Ref.: Chen P. "The Doctor’s Failure to Cut Costs" NY Times March 3, 2010 (Extracts are for discussion purposes, only)

In an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Howard Brody, professor of family medicine and director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, writes that the medical profession, unlike other groups, has made little effort to curtail future medical costs. Physicians, Dr. Brody maintains, are not “innocent bystanders” to spiraling health care costs but have been complicit in their failure to take an active role in curtailing them.

Doctors have two responsibilities. First, they have a moral duty as an individual advocate. A doctor has a responsibility to his or her individual patients to make them healthier and to help them live longer.

But doctors have a second moral duty: they have an obligation to the general public to be prudent stewards of scarce resources. Doctors only get about 10 percent of health care costs in their pockets, but they control about 80 percent. That isn’t our money — it’s someone else’s — and the public has entrusted us to spend it as wisely as possible.

Q. So is it all about the money?

A. No. It’s an unfortunate joining of money with other issues and motives. We have an American public that generally believes more is better. And rather than giving up bad habits, exercising and eating right, they would rather believe that the answer to health is in high technology.

When you combine this love affair with high technology with a reimbursement system that pays so much more for technology — and less for thinking and sitting and talking with patients — you end up with an expensive kind of medicine, which, when practiced by doctors, puts more money into their pockets.