unnecessary surgery

Treatments that don’t help patients, and may even harm them, are difficult to eliminate because they can be big sources of revenue.

Nearly 1 in 3 Medicare patients undergoes an operation in the final year of life. The benefits are often limited, but the costs and side effects can be substantial.

Unnecessary or needlessly expensive care costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Patients, employers and taxpayers are footing the bill.

A Washington Post analysis of 125,000 records of Florida patients who underwent spinal fusion found that about half had diagnoses that experts and…