The most common knee surgery for seniors is costly, and usually a waste
The most common knee surgery performed on people over 65 is repair of torn meniscus cartilage. The procedure is costly, at up to $10,000 a patient — and it’s also usually a waste, if not outright harmful.
“It’s known that this procedure is often done without strong evidence; I don’t think it’s well known that this is one of the most common surgeries in the U.S.,” said Martin Makary, a professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore and author of a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Surgery. “We not only described it, we looked at it in a population every American pays for (through Medicare). That’s a price tag and a context I’m not sure people have really calculated.”
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