Mr. Chairman, quality care is certainly an interesting concept but how do we make sure that we are getting quality? For the dollars we spend we have to look at outcomes. Are we actually delivering the product that we are purporting to deliver when we undertake a procedure?
The hon. member for St. Paul's who is also a physician mentioned that politicians lack the courage to address the issue of many outdated procedures that are not actually delivering value. She made a very good point. Where do we get the idea that if a physician orders every test in the book that it is good medicine? Frankly many tests are performed that actually are not needed.
I asked a surgeon that very question recently. I know it is not how he was trained. The hon. member opposite was trained in clinical and differential diagnosis so she could determine which tests were more likely to be necessary rather than just testing everything. The physician was not too happy with the question but his response was that there are two drivers.
One driver is patient expectation. Somehow patients expect that if they take every test in the book and it takes three weeks, six weeks or 10 weeks to do it, that this is good medicine. One of the problems is the patient has no idea what these tests cost. Worse yet, the physician has no idea whether they cost $300 or $3,000 or $30,000. That is a major concern.
The other driver is that nobody has been sued for taking too many tests. That is a major driver in our system as well. When we are talking about quality care we have to make sure that we are actually getting value for what we are doing rather than just doing procedures for the sake of doing them.