Over-Use of Specialists Is One Of The Biggest Drivers Of High Healthcare Costs

From the NY Times:

The Affordable Care Act was misnamed; it should have been called the Access to Unaffordable Care Act. In 2015 health care spending reached $3.2 trillion — $10,000 for every man, woman and child in America. While our health care system is the most expensive in the world by far, on many measures of performance it ranked last out of 11 developed countries, according to a 2014 Commonwealth Fund Report.

But deregulation will not fix it. To the extent that we can call it a market at all, health care is not self-correcting. Instead, it is a colossal network of unaccountable profit centers, the pricing of which has been controlled by medical specialists since the mid-20th century. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have been willing to address this.

Most Americans mistakenly believe that they must see specialists for almost every medical problem. What people don’t know is that specialists essentially determine the services that are covered by insurance, and the prices that may be charged for them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/opinion/sunday/the-specialists-stranglehold-on-medicine.html