A recent study compared physician fees in the U.S. with those of physicians in dissimilar health care systems in other countries and concluded the U.S. has higher fees and higher health care costs.

Did we need another study to tell us that? We already know that health spending is about 17% of GDP.

The study totally disregards that physician services account for one-sixth of health care costs in the U.S., and this segment is growing more slowly than other segments of health care spending. Yet, across the U.S., physicians’ average incomes have not kept pace with the rising costs of managing an office.

In his article, “How Doctors Could Rescue Health Care,” published in The New York Review of Books, Arnold Relman attributes four-fifths of health care costs to hospital and nursing home care, payment for drugs and other medical products and the overhead of private insurers. Indeed, he points to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) actuarial study that found the insurance industry’s overhead and profits alone add $152 billion to the cost of care.

That said, what we need to focus on in this time of health reform is how we improve our health care delivery system. We do not have unlimited resources. We need to work together to provide the best use of current resources and to coordinate and improve care for all of our patients.