Study: Riskier surgeries for back pain raise costs

CHICAGO (AP) — A study of Medicare patients shows that costlier, more complex spinal fusion surgeries are on the rise — and sometimes done unnecessarily — for a common lower-back condition caused by aging and arthritis.

What's more alarming is that the findings suggest these more challenging operations are riskier, leading to more complications and even deaths.

"This is exactly what the health-care debate has been dancing around," said Dr. Eugene Carragee of Stanford University Medical Center.

"You have one kind of operation that could cost $20,000 and another that could cost $80,000 and there's not good evidence the expensive one is being used appropriately in the majority of cases," Carragee said.

Add to that the expense for patients whose problems after surgery send them back to the hospital or to a nursing home and "that's not a trivial amount of money" for Medicare, said Carragee. He wrote an accompanying editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association where the federally funded study appears Wednesday.