The Danger of Too Much Health Care
How Overtesting and Overmedicating Harm Patients and Society
Early in her talk about the importance of giving patients the information they need to make medical decisions, Shannon Brownlee emphasized the relevance of the topic in dramatic fashion.
“How many of you have had an elective surgery?” she asked a full house at an event co-sponsored by Zócalo Public Square and the California HealthCare Foundation, prompting about a third of the crowd to raise their hands.
Brownlee, the acting director of the health policy program at the New America Foundation, defined elective procedures as any in which the patient has a …
