Healthy, ‘Anxious’ Patients Might Be Driving Up Cost of Care
ABC's "World News Tonight" on Oct. 29 examined the phenomenon of the "worried well," those "healthy, anxious patients" who are increasingly using the health care system and boosting costs. Offering a great deal of sometimes "alarming" medical news, television, Web sites and other sources are "feed[ing] the anxiety" of the worried well, and whose are growing, ABC News reports. About 16% of U.S. residents had 11 doctor's visits and medical tests in 1997, but that percentage grew to 22% in 2001. Some doctors point to direct-to-consumer advertising by drug makers for the increase in the worried well, while others say technological advances and the "general belief that an earlier diagnosis improves the prognosis" have lead to an "impatient culture concerned about maintaining health," ABC News reports. Dr. Thomas Schwenk, chair of the department of family medicine at the University of Michigan, said, "(Direct-to-consumer) advertising is a very destabilizing force to the public's trust in physicians. Patients ask me all the time for medication when they don't even have the problem the medication is supposed to treat." Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, said, "I think the burden is substantial both in money and in physician time. Certainly a lot of the tests that may be done for people that come in are expensive, and we all pay for them through our health insurance premiums." To address the problem, some doctors are calling for patients to "lower their expectations for immediate results and definitive outcomes," ABC News reports (Judd, "World News Tonight," ABC, 10/29).
A video clip of the segment is available in RealPlayer online.
