Editing Perverse incentive (section)

=== Healthcare cost control ===

* Paying [[Health professional|medical professionals]] and reimbursing insured patients for treatment but not prevention encourages medical conditions to be ignored until treatment is required.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Robinson |first1=JC |date=21 April 2004 |title=Reinvention of health insurance in the consumer era. |journal=[[Journal of the American Medical Association|JAMA]] |volume=291 |issue=15 |pages=1880–6 |doi=10.1001/jama.291.15.1880 |pmid=15100208|url=https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/6kk5k20f }}</ref> Moreover, paying only for treatment effectively discourages prevention (which would improve quality of life for the patient but would also reduce the demand for future treatments).
* Payment for treatment generates a perverse incentive for unnecessary treatments. In 2015, a Detroit area doctor was sentenced to 45 years of prison for intentionally giving patients unnecessary cancer treatments, for which health insurance paid him at least 17.6 million dollars.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Moghe |first=Sonia |date=2015-07-11 |title=Patients give horror stories as cancer doctor gets 45 years |url=https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/10/us/michigan-cancer-doctor-sentenced/index.html |access-date=2024-11-04 |website=CNN |language=en}}</ref> Unnecessary treatment may harm in the form of side effects of drugs and surgery, which can then trigger a demand for further treatments themselves.
* [[Medicare (United States)|Medicare]] reimburses doctors at a higher rate if they administer more expensive medications to treat a condition. This creates an incentive for the physician to prescribe a more expensive drug when a less expensive one might do.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Sanger-katz |first=Margot |date=2016-03-10 |title=Medicare Tries an Experiment to Fight Perverse Incentives |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/10/upshot/medicare-tries-an-experiment-to-fight-perverse-incentives.html |access-date=2016-07-30 |newspaper=The New York Times |issn=0362-4331}}</ref>