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  3. Too Much Healthcare A) For people who had been awaiting the rollout of the Affordable Care Act in order to obtain health ins

Too Much Healthcare A) For people who had been awaiting the rollout of the Affordable Care Act in order to obtain health ins

admin2022-07-18  63
问题                                                 Too Much Healthcare
    A) For people who had been awaiting the rollout of the Affordable Care Act in order to obtain health insurance for the first time, the major problem associated with American healthcare has been a lack of access to it. But for a surprising number of Americans, the greater problem may be exactly the opposite: They are receiving too much healthcare. And that’s not good news for either their wallets or their physical well-being.
    B) The most recent estimate from the Institute of Medicine is that about 30 percent of total healthcare expenditures in America go toward unneeded care. Doctors, too, have acknowledged the problem: In a 2011 survey published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 42 percent of American primary care physicians said that patients in their own practice were getting more care than necessary.
    C) Excessive care typically takes the form of overabundant referrals (转诊病人) to specialists, more diagnostic tests than would be medically necessary, or too many prescriptions—but in some cases, it can extend to actual treatments or surgeries that are not clinically indicated. Richard Baron, president of the American Board of Internal Medicine, is candid (直言不讳的) about the problem. "There were and are lots of things being done in healthcare that don’t reliably benefit patients," he says.
    D) From a patient perspective, it can be hard to see at first glance how too much care could be a problem. But unneeded healthcare can be physically damaging. "Anything we do in medicine and healthcare has expected benefits and harms," says Brenda Sirovich, a research associate at the VA Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont. "Any time you have an intervention for a patient, no matter how small there is also the chance that it’s going to do some harm."
    E) Even for initial screening tests that pose no risk in themselves, there’s the problem of the "downstream effect"; if the first test produces an ambiguous result or a false positive, it can lead to more invasive testing that does carry substantial risk. "As you intervene on patients who have less and less reason to intervene and less and less chance of benefiting, you still retain that probability of harming them," says Sirovich. "In a word, that is the biggest problem with doing too much—the risk of harm."
    F) In some cases, the roots of the excess care are noble: Doctors just want to provide the best possible care for their patients. The operating assumption for many both inside and outside the medical field tends to be that if a little care does a little good, a lot of care will do a lot of good. Given the time constraints that many physicians are under, it can seem safest to default to over-ordering.
    G) But there are several other major drivers of overutilization (过度医疗) , as well. Experts debate exactly how much the threat of lawsuits influences physicians in their practice of medicine, but physicians themselves say that fear of legal challenges is a substantial factor in motivating them to provide too much care.
    H) Skeptics challenge that physicians might not be in the best position to know exactly what motivates their own behavior. But a study published in Health Affairs this summer suggests that the malpractice effect is real. According to the report, doctors who acknowledge having a strong fear of malpractice are more likely to show a pattern of ordering aggressive diagnostic tests, and they’re also more likely to refer patients to the ER (急诊室) for treatment. This makes intuitive sense: Doctors are rarely asked if they did too much, but they are constantly questioned as to whether or not they did enough—and they know they can wind up in legal trouble if patients don’t think their care was sufficient.
    I) Perhaps more troubling than medical liability issues are the financial incentives inherent in the American healthcare system. Most American healthcare currently operates on a fee-for-service model, where physicians receive payment for every service performed, regardless of whether that service actually benefits the patient or not. In some cases, especially where physicians self-refer their patients for expensive diagnostic tests and treatments, there can be substantial financial incentives for ordering interventions that might not be medically necessary.
    J) Several recent studies have explored whether financial incentives influence how physicians practice, and the answer, unsurprisingly, is that they do. In October, for example, a report in the New England Journal of Medicine examined the "self-referral effect" among urologists (泌尿科医生) treating patients fox prostate cancer (前列腺癌). The study found that doctors are substantially more likely to order radiation therapy for their prostate cancer patients if those doctors have ownership interests in the radiation services they are offering. Over the five-year period from 2005 to 2010, the use of radiation therapy by self-referring urologists in private practice jumped 19.2 percentage points, whereas the rate among their non self-referring peers barely budged, going up just 1.3 percentage points.
    K) Jean Mitchell, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and the author of the report, acknowledges that her study can’t ultimately speak to the motivations of the physicians involved. But she sees reason to be concerned. "There’s been this dramatic trend toward aggressive treatment of prostate cancer, even though basically the clinical data suggest that we should move away from that," she says. "The issue is that it seems like being steered toward the treatment that is going to have the most financial benefit for the urologist."
    L) The self-referral effect isn’t unique to radiology. Earlier this summer, a report of the United States Government Accountability Office examined rates of referrals for biopsies (活组织检查) and found that between 2004 and 2010, referrals for biopsies more than doubled among self-referring physicians, even while they increased only 38 percent among those who referred outside their own practices.
    M) As physicians, researchers, and policy experts have grown to recognize the problem of excessive care, there have been a number of attempts to combat the problem. One of the most talked-about provisions of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, for example, is the provision for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). Under this provision, a network of doctors and hospitals that agrees to act as an ACO receives financial incentives to figure out how to maximize quality while simultaneously reducing costs and eliminating waste in the system. The idea is to encourage healthcare networks to take more collective responsibility for population health and reward better care, rather than simply more care.
    N) Physician groups are also stepping up to solve the problem. One widely publicized effort is the Choosing Wisely campaign which is set out to promote conversations between doctors and patients about utilizing the most effective tests and treatments while avoiding unnecessary care. To this end, organizers began calling on physician societies to compile lists of the top five tests and procedures in their respective specialties that were most susceptible to overuse. To date, more than 50 physician societies have joined the campaign, each contributing their own "top 5" list.
    O) For Sirovich, these initiatives offer signs of hope. Fifteen years ago, she says, conversations about the harms of medical care or excessive spending weren’t likely to come up, but today, she hears more patients—and fellow physicians—talking about the harms of overuse.
    P) But despite hints of change, the problem of overutilization is likely to persist for some time. After all, it took more than a century to construct the current healthcare system, and change does not come easily.
People seldom talked about the harms of medical care or excessive spending fifteen years ago.
选项
答案O
解析 题干意为，在十五年前，人们很少讨论医疗护理和过度花费的危害。根据题干中的关键词fifteen years ago可定位到O段。该段第二句提到，斯洛维奇说，在十五年前，有关医疗护理和过度开销危害的对话是很难开展的。然而在今天，她听到了更多的病人和医生讨论起了滥用医疗护理的危害。由此可知，题干是对原文的同义转述，故选O。
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