Letter: A health care disaster

Medical costs will double within seven years and would double again if the economy could sustain it. At the current rate, health care would cost $82,000 per person in 2025. We are all going to become uninsured — the question is "When?"

When we are all priced out of insurance, we will have to cut away the medical treatment that is not working and this will make Mills Peninsula hospital a financial disaster.

Coronary surgery is an example. It is the financial engine of the hospital expansion going on across the United States and on the Peninsula. It will grind to halt when Americans understand the full story. Heart bypass operations and angioplasty do not prevent enough heart attacks to pay their way. This has been accepted by top cardiologists but this has not stopped the operations. It is even accepted that placing stents in coronary arteries causes heart attacks in 4 percent of cases. But it goes on. It won't when we become realists.

Right now most Americans would refuse heart bypass surgery if they were told the full story about coronary surgery. Death is just one of the hazards - and it is not even the worst thing that can happen. About 40 percent of those getting the operation have cognitive harm. Thinking and memory problems are sometimes so severe that patients are described as "another person." Some surgeons now do artery transplants without stopping the heart in the hope that this will reduce the amount of cognitive harm.

If the profit from coronary surgery were taken out of projections, the Peninsula Medical Center project would quietly fold.

In 1995, it was believed that HMOs and managed care would control doctors' ability to order their own services. It was confidently predicted that half of the hospitals would be closed by the year 2000 and there would be 200,000 surplus doctors.

Fee-for-service medical care won the media battle that followed. Un-managed care won't win again when health care costs cause an economic melt down. And the Mills Peninsula complex will be a financial disaster.

It is time to look ahead and use common sense.

Jack Button

Redwood City