Slaying The 'Fee-for-Service Monster' Of American Healthcare

In the United States, healthcare providers are typically paid based on services provided. The more tests a patient undergoes, the bigger the bill.

Vivian Lee, a radiologist and healthcare executive, says this fee-for-service business model needs to be reconsidered.

"You're rewarding people doing things to other people. And actually, in many cases, you're rewarding that regardless of whether it actually improves a person's health. So as long as you do a lot of procedures, as long as you poke and prod patients and do more colonoscopies or operations or administer expensive chemotherapeutic agents, the more you do to them, the more money you make."

Lee is the author of The Long Fix: Solving America's Health Care Crisis With Strategies that Work for Everyone. On this episode of Hidden Brain, Lee joins us to examine how American medicine became so profit driven, and to discuss ways to reach the best health outcomes at the lowest price. [Copyright 2020 NPR]