The Costs Of Defensive Medicine Quantified

The use of unnecessary medical tests and procedures driven by a fear of malpractice lawsuits, commonly known as 'defensive medicine', has been estimated to cost up to $46 billion annually in the U.S.  It used to be that we didn't want medical decisions being made by insurance companies, and instead they became dictated by lawyers.  For a recent paper, the authors estimated the cost of defensive medicine on three services – tests, procedures or hospitalizations – by asking physicians to estimate the defensiveness of their own orders. The authors invited 42 hospital physicians to complete a survey, which 36 physicians did and rated 4,215 orders for 769 patients in the research letter.   read more

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