Americans get too much healthcare, their docs say

Here is a diagnosis of what's wrong with health care in America, straight from the horse's mouth: There's too much.

In a new poll of primary care physicians, nearly half of them said their patients received too much medical care and more than a quarter said they were practicing more aggressively than they'd like to.

That could mean ordering more tests, prescribing more drugs or diagnosing people with diseases, although they would never have experienced any symptoms.

On the other hand, just six percent of doctors believed their patients were getting too little care.

"Physicians at the frontline of medical care are telling us that their patients are getting too much care," said Dr. Brenda Sirovich of the VA Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont, who worked on the survey. "And we don't think we are just talking about the 627 physicians that we surveyed."

The findings come at a time when the healthcare budget is already overstretched and many fear it is about to spiral out of control.

"We spend a lot on healthcare in this country, more than anywhere else," Sirovich, also at the Dartmouth Medical School, told Reuters Health. "We realize that this is unsustainable."

Insurance transparency will make your insurance better - Beginning January 2011, all insurance plans will have to report how much of your premiums they spend on care and provide you rebates if they spend too much on profits.

You will have more access to affordable care through community health centers - Money will be provided to expand current community health centers and create new ones, giving you access to new places for free or low-cost care.

According to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. spent $7,960 per capita on healthcare in 2009. That's $2,608 more than Norway, the runner-up, shelled out.

Dr. Lisa Schwartz and Dr. Steven Woloshin, who also worked on the new study, were two of the three authors of a book called "Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health."

THE TALE OF THE MORPHINE PUMP

And it's not only your wallet that could end up hurting from excessive testing, experts say. In a short article published along with the poll in the Archives of Internal Medicine, one doctor recounted the story of a man who developed intractable pain after falling on an icy driveway.

He had several tests at the hospital, but all of them came up empty, writes Dr. Philip Wickenden Bale of the T.J Sampson Hospital in Glasgow, Kentucky.

All along, the man's wife had been telling doctors that her husband had a morphine pump in his back to treat chronic pain and that he'd fallen onto the pump. But no one had listened.