Dr. Peter J. Weiss

I bet you thought that China was a com­mu­nist coun­try with government-controlled health­care.

So did I until I saw this arti­cle from USA Today, which was reprinted in my local paper this morn­ing.  Yes, China does have a sin­gle national health­care sys­tem but per­haps the gov­ern­ment isn’t in as much con­trol as it would like.

Appar­ently the system’s per­verse eco­nomic incen­tives are dri­ving Chi­nese physi­cians and hos­pi­tals to overuse intra­venous drugs.

Here are two telling excerpts from the arti­cle:

“Hos­pi­tals want to make prof­its so they pre­scribe a lot of drugs and give [intra­venous] drips for colds and flu,” says Li Ling, a pro­fes­sor of health eco­nom­ics at Bei­jing Uni­ver­sity and a key adviser on the gov­ern­ment changes that she helped to draft. “Doc­tors’ salaries are based on the rev­enue they gen­er­ate, so they have a huge incen­tive to over-prescribe,” she says.

Zhu Youdi, author of a book on China’s health care changes, says, “Doc­tors over-prescribe because they receive kick­backs from phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies and a per­cent­age of the pre­scrip­tion fee from their hos­pi­tal.

Does this sound famil­iar? How health­care is funded and reim­bursed mat­ters.  When providers are reim­bursed to do more, more gets done.  It’s a uni­ver­sal prin­ci­ple, which applies just as much in China as in the United States.

Now I am a cap­i­tal­ist, but, as both the U.S. and China demon­strate, more health­care is not always bet­ter.  More health and less care is what we want, what we need, and what we deserve.

Let’s take a look at our own health­care sys­tem and restruc­ture the incen­tives to reward more health, not more health­care.  We can do it!