Health Care Costs, Communication and Informed Choices

For those of you who’ve been asleep for the past year: the health care costs conundrum remains unsolved. Our annual medical bills run in the neighborhood of $2.4 trillion and that number’s heading up. Reform, even in its watered-down, reddened form, has stalled.

Despite so much unending review of medical expenses – attributed variously to an unfit, aging population, expensive new cancer drugs, innovative procedures, insurance companies and big Pharma – there’s been surprisingly little consideration for patients’ preferences. What’s missing is a solid discussion of the type and extent of treatments people would want if they were sufficiently informed of their medical options and circumstances.

Maybe, if doctors would ask their adult patients how much care they really want, the price of health care would go down. That’s because many patients would choose less, at least in the way of technology, than their doctors prescribe. And more care.

What I’m talking about is the opposite of rationing. It’s about choosing.

Several recent stories have considered the problem of physicians not talking with their patients about treatment limits. Last month the journal Cancer published a study, based on canvassing over 4000 doctors who care for cancer patients in California, North Carolina, Iowa and Alabama, revealing that only a minority of physicians would raise the subject of a DNR order or hospice care for patients with metastatic cancer and a short life expectancy.

When it comes to recommending palliative care, aimed at patients’ nutrition and comfort, rather than cure, some doctors remain tight-lipped. Many good physicians, including cancer specialists, are reluctant to stop prescribing chemotherapy and aggressive treatments. The reasons vary. Based on my experience as a practicing oncologist, I’ll list a few:

Some doctors think it’s better for their patients if they are upbeat, and this may indeed be true. Conversely, many patients choose doctors who are optimistic: if you tell patients there are no treatment options, they’ll go elsewhere. Most patients, of course, do want treatment; more than a few are desperate enough to try anything a doctor says might work.

Another, unfortunate factor is financial pressure; giving treatment and doing procedures is far more lucrative than simple exam and discussion-based visits. I’m afraid, too, that many physicians don’t recognize the extent they’re influenced by effective marketing, usually blatant but sometimes subtle.

For others it’s an ego thing – doctors try to “outsmart” a disease, even when it’s not feasible, trying one therapy and the next, to no avail.

Harder to assess, still, is doctors’ internal unwillingness to give up on some patients because they care about them so much. Some excellent doctors may become so invested in a case that they, themselves, cannot be objective.

Besides, “throwing in the towel” is not something most good doctors like to do. And it’s not something most patients want to hear about.

Yet, maybe some dying patients would appreciate a doctor’s honesty –

These issues relate directly to the practice of oncology, the area of medicine I know best. But similar hesitations and conflicts of interest arise among doctors in most fields – cardiologists caring for people with severe heart disease, neurologists caring for people with end-stage Parkinson’s, and infectious disease experts caring for people with late-stage HIV, to name a few.

If doctors could somehow find the time, and take the trouble, to talk with their patients in a meaningful way, and then heed their patients’ wishes, they might find that many patients would, of their own volition, put a brake on health care spending.

For this reason, among the changes in health care I most favor is greater support for primary care and non-procedural services. If  were paid more for thinking and communicating, rather than ordering tests and performing treatments in a perfunctory manner, they and their patients might opt for less expensive, more humane remedies.

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• A Small Study Offers Insight On Breast Cancer Patients’ Capacity and Eagerness to Participate in Medical Decisions
• Are Doctors Necessary?
• When ‘No’ Turns Positive in Medical Care and Education