ABC’s “Four Corners” program on waste in health care didn’t pull any punches. “Many common treatments are often unnecessary, ineffective, or worse still harmful,” said presenter Kerry O'Brien, introducing a special investigation narrated by long-time ABC health reporter Dr. Norman Swan. “Waste runs into tens of billions of dollars a year—much of it due to overdiagnosis and the ill-advised treatments that follow.”
For those who missed it, the program of Sept. 27 focused on several high-cost areas of health care where the evidence suggests that too much medicine is doing us more harm than good: knee pain, back pain, chest pain, and PSA (prostate specific antigen) screening for prostate cancer.
The program’s key targets were sophisticated and expensive medical tests—such as computed tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs)—being ordered in ever greater numbers, often unnecessarily. In the past 10 years for example, general practitioners (GPs) have increased their test ordering by more than 50 percent. This equates to around four million extra tests a year.
