Reagan quotes Professor John Caronna of Cornel Medical Center as saying, "There's no way to shut it off. The doctors crave it, it's reassuring, and the patients crave it" (well-insured patients, presumably, who like to feel that their care is given in the latest style).
Because of advances in knowledge, technology has developed that permits new treatments in practically every medical specialty--the replacement of joints in orthopedics; skin grafting in plastic surgery; heart transplants and coronary bypasses in thoracic surgery; kidney transplants and renal dialysis in nephrology; ear implants in otolaryngology; laser surgery in ophthalmology, and the list lengthens to include up to the minute sophisticated diagnostic tools such as MRI and CAT scanners. There is seemingly no limit to the amount of money Americans want to spend on medical technologies. The advancement of technology is one of the "blameless factors" in the assessment of rising health care costs; there are however, many sources of our current health care woes with regard to expensive technologies.
Because doctors have been concerned about their personal liability in terms of an increasing number of malpractice suits, medical technology is overused in favor of being underused. In addition, however, many argue that too few of the latest diagnostic devices may prove harmful as well. In Health of Nations, Laurence Graig looks at the Canadian health care system to expose the dangers of too few pieces of equipment for too many people:
In Toronto, three-and-a-half million people share two magnetic resonance imagers. In Montreal there are twenty-one computerized tomography scanners to service a population of more than two million. In one Canadian province there is only one CT scanner for one-half million people. A patient can only have a CT scan on referral by a specialist, at which point the waiting time begins, often lasting more than two months. Even such rou...