A new report from the Lown Institute found over one in five coronary stents surgically inserted by corrupt physicians between 2019 and 2021 were unnecessary, costing Medicare $800 million a year and putting patient-victims at risk of complications such as stroke, heart attack and death.
Waste in health care has long been recognized as a cause of patient harm and excess costs. In 2010, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) called attention to the problem, suggesting that “unnecessary services” are the largest contributor to waste in United States (US) health care, accounting for approximately $210 billion of the estimated $750 billion in excess spending each year. Medicalization starts early in the US, leading eventually to being over drugged and over stented later in life. Infant deaths have risen for the first time in 20 years. The increases were particularly stark among babies born to Native American, Alaska Native and white mothers in 2022. Rates among Black infants remained highest of all. The increase is a grim manifestation of the state of maternal and child health in the United States. Infant and maternal mortality, inextricably linked, are widely considered to be biomarkers of a society’s overall health, and US rates are higher than those in other industrialized countries.
Another recent trend in Medicalized America is unneeded hernia repair using “component separation.” Component separation is a technically difficult and risky surgery. Yet more and more surgeons are using it since 2006, when the approach — which had long been used in plastic surgery — was adapted for hernias. Over the next 15 years, the number of times that physicians billed Medicare for a hernia component separation increased more than tenfold, to around 8,000 per year. That figure is a fraction of the actual number because most hernia patients are too young to be covered by Medicare. This occurs despite the most costly health care system in the world and the gobs of money spent on “health care research” at the NIH (National Institutes of Health). Most of the research dollars spent by NIH are for developing drugs to treat symptoms. And most don’t work.
Researchers warn of the dangers stenting can pose, but there is money to be made in the privatized, deregulated US treatment system. Unnecessary stents, and other unnecessary procedures performed by physicians, such as C-sections, are big money-makers for the people who erroneously insist on being called “doctor.” Complications of stent procedures can include blood clots, abdominal bleeding, kidney damage, heart attack, and death.
Unnecessary stents are great for physicians, but may also cause financial hardships for patients because the procedure typically costs Medicare $10,615, with the patient paying $1,600 out-of-pocket, according to the report. Patients with private insurance may pay more, including privatized, corporatized Medicare Advantage plans. Remember, Medicare Advantage is neither Medicare, nor an advantage. Cardiac procedures cost private insurance companies on average more than $20,000, according to a 2022 study published in JAMA Internal Network.
Such a money-maker are these procedures for physicians, that an unnecessary coronary stent is inserted into a U.S. patient every seven minutes, costing Medicare upwards of $2.44 billion between 2019 and 2021. The researchers studied at over 1,700 general hospitals nationwide and found more than 229,000 procedures were nonessential, estimating over 20% of stents were placed unnecessarily across the three-year period.
In the SF Bay Area of California, Kaiser Permanente has one of the lowest rates of unneccessary stents, with a rate of 1.5%. In states such as Texas, where tort reform prevents people from suing their physician-perpetrators for unnecessary medical procedures, Northwest Texas Hospital and Riverview Regional Medical Center in Alabama were the hospitals with the highest rates of unnecessary coronary stent procedures, totaling 52.58% and 50% of their procedures, respectively. The physicians running the hospital in Texas that is purposely harming patients for profit are : Teresa Baker, MD, Emilio Belaval, MD, Jesus Garcia, MD, Mazin Saadaldin, MD, and Brian Weis, MD.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 