KFF Health News November 17, 2023
Medical advances are expensive. Take Wegovy, the wildly successful obesity drug that we learned last week may also reduce the risk of heart disease. If just 10 percent of Medicare beneficiaries start taking the drug, taxpayers could be on the hook for nearly $27 billion a year.
So how can the country afford the latest and greatest in medicine? One possibility: Stop paying billions of dollars a year for stuff that doesn’t help patients and might even harm them. As much as 30 percent of the $3 trillion we spend on health care annually goes to such low-value care, as I reported in this story.
Some examples: Doctors continue to prescribe unneeded opiates or antipsychotics, routinely screen for vitamin...
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