Too much coronary angioplasty in the USA?: less may be better - the conflicting roles of inexactness of medicine as a science, asymmetric information, technologic imperative, unnecessary care and ethicomedicinomics in US healthcare.

Abstract

US healthcare expenditure per capita far exceeds that of any other nation in the world. Indeed, over the last 15 years, the USA has distantly surpassed most countries in the developed world in total healthcare expenditures per capita with the USA now spending 17.4% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare ($7960 per capita), compared with only 8.5% of GDP in Japan ($2878 per capita), a distant second. Consequently, by current projections, the US healthcare bill will have ballooned from $2.5 trillion in 2009 to over $4.6 trillion by 2020. Such spending growth rates are unsustainable and the system would soon go broke if not corrected. The drivers of these spending growth rates in US healthcare are several and varied. Indeed, in September 2012, the Institute of Medicine reported that US healthcare squandered $750 billion in 2009 through unneeded care, Byzantine paperwork, fraud and other wasteful activities. Recently, the question was raised as to whether we have too much coronary angioplasty in the USA. In this analysis, we examine these and other various related aspects of US healthcare, make comparisons with other national healthcare delivery systems, and suggest several reengineering modalities to help fix these compellingly glaring glitches and maladies of US healthcare.