Health Care

Re “In Health Care, We Cannot Have It All” (Commentary, Dec. 27): David Broder attributes early hospital discharge to “consumer appetites,” but treads lightly upon the “corporate profit motive” that drives this technology.

Medicine, as Hippocrates envisioned it, was to be practiced as an art, but it has become a Madison Avenue commodity. “Drive-through surgery” and “self-care home nursing” dilute the quality of health care and endanger the lives of patients. Moreover, when profit becomes more important than lives, we as a society are in deep trouble.

Personally, after being “cut up” 28 times, I will gladly settle for another day in the hospital in lieu of an exotic test, and I don’t want an insurance company or an HMO compromising my recovery for monetary expediency.

DERVA J. SNIDER

San Juan Capistrano

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What Broder said is quite true. Much of what constitutes modern medicine, other than prescription drugs, has not been tested rigorously. However, this is changing with the growth of HMOs, which are demanding patient outcome research data with which to determine the appropriate use of costly technology.

Fee-for-service medicine never demanded this level of patient outcome research, especially for physician services. Worse yet, fee-for-service medicine advocates actively attack HMOs for “withholding needed care,” fully recognizing that they do not have the data required to define what is needed and what is not.

JEFF McCOMBS, Health Economist

USC School of Pharmacy