Defensive Medicine Not Just an Issue for Specialists, Survey Finds
29th June 2010
Telling doctors not to perform a particular test or procedure likely won’t be too effective if they think they’ll later be sued for not offering that very test or procedure.
Oh, ya think?
What’s the cost of all this defensive medicine? Hard to say. Study authors cite an estimate of as much as $60 billion. As we wrote last year, direct spending on medical malpractice litigation is pegged at about $30 billion annually, but money spent on tests that wouldn’t have been ordered were it not for the fear of a lawsuit is a more amorphous figure to capture.
We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.