Ward Burdick Award Article: The Golden Age of American Medicine

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Abstract
Commercialization of medicine with introduction of the profit motive is changing the patient care process, reducing the professional independence of physicians and inflating the total cost of medical care. The payers for medical care, governments at all levels and employers, are no longer willing or able to accept continuing escalation in the costs of medical care. Correction of financial distortions is an inevitable process in every economic milieu, and distortions in the health care system will be corrected in one way or another. Medicine is an unusual enterprise in that there are no sharp dividing lines between what is necessary and what is clearly unnecessary or between perfectly acceptable and unacceptable outcomes. Initiatives to define what is necessary and what is acceptable are being taken by organized medicine and by the federal government. This has been described as a “revolution” in medicine, but there is no other viable approach to balancing medical care requirements with available resources.

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