Comment by colonCapitalDee

There is absolutely a middle ground? The healthcare system, like any system, has an incentive structure. Doctors are incentivized to prescribe treatments, because that's how they make money for themselves and their practice. Doctors are not angels sent from heaven, they're people like you and me, and they respond to incentives like you and me. It's also well known that people strongly prefer receiving treatment over not receiving treatment, even when the cost to their health of receiving that treatment outweighs the expected benefit! Given that people push their doctors into prescribing treatments, and doctors are incentivized to go along with it... you would obviously expect some proportion of prescribed treatments to not be medically necessary. 5% sounds about right. And the kicker is that denying these treatments improves health outcomes for the general population, because those medical resources can get routed to the people who actually need them. Every successful public health system has an opposing force built in to it to limit the spurious consumption of scare medical resources, because without such a force costs balloon and the system becomes unsustainable. Not to defend the US healthcare system of course, our cost problem is worse than anywhere else...