Cost cutting! Cost cutting! Cost cutting! That’s the new mantra under Obamacare. As a consequence, perhaps, we are beginning to see new medical advice seeking to dissuade us from some cancer screening tests due to “false positives.” And now, we see a study telling us that involved and engaged patients cost the system more. From the Health Day story:

Although doctors and patients have long been urged to share decision-making, new research finds that patients who are involved in their care spend more time in the hospital and increase the cost of their hospital stay. Researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Center found that patients who share in decision-making raise the cost of their admission by an average of $865.“The result that everyone would have liked — that patients who are more engaged in their care do better and cost less — is not what we found in this setting,” the study’s author, Dr. David Meltzer, associate professor of medicine, economics and public policy at the University of Chicago, said in a university news release. “Patients who want to be more involved do not have lower costs. Patients, as consumers, may value elements of care that the health care system might not.”
The researchers said there are roughly 35 million hospitalizations each year in the United States. They calculated that if 30 percent of those patients shared in decision-making on their care instead of allowing their doctor to call the shots, it would result in $8.7 billion in additional costs every year.

After so much emphasis over decades on patient decision-making–often focusing on the right to say no–I worry that studies such as this will be used by Obamacare cost/benefit bureaucrats as an excuse to prevent patients from deciding to say yes. Or to put it another way, don’t let the bean counters ever tell you to mind your own business when it comes to your own medical decisions.

Your doctor’s job when she or he is treating you, is you–not other patients. Otherwise, the doctor will become hopelessly entwined in serious conflicts of interest.