State

Thomas Sowell makes sense. Alice in Medical Care He writes so brilliantly: Read the whole thing.

State

Gawd, here's another great link: Myths on health care - Opinion - USATODAY.com

Wow, great article. Steve Findlay says that nearly a third of what doctors do is unnecessary. Tort reform, anyone?

Michael

That is one scary thread title. I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

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Patters

The cost of our health insurance is out of whack. We spend at least 1/3rd more per capita than is spent by other countries, and we spend a larger share of our GDP on health care:

International Comparisons of Health Care - A Comparison Of Health Care Spending, Resources, And Utilization

My guess is that our national health care plan will allow people to get higher quality insurance for a price, which will allow faster treatment on elective care.

When I worked in Norway, I was on their national health plan, but the company I worked for provided me with private insurance as well, which would allow me to go to a private hospital if I needed faster treatment. When I worked in Sweden, I had bad laryngitis on the Sunday night before going for a 6 month assignment to Lisbon, Portugal. Rather than deal with doctors, I kept putting it off (trying gross natural cures that tasted like dirt), until finally Sunday night I called the health office to find out what I should do. They sent a doctor to my home who gave me a prescription for penicillin. Because it was Sunday night, they charged me $15. That's one area where Sweden provided better service. In the states, I would have had to go to an emergency room, which would have cost me and my insurance company a lot more.

Leave No Doubt

We're so screwed. There'll be a Healthcare Czar who will know as much about healthcare as the Car czar did about cars.

Then there's this:
CNSNews.com - Democrats Bury ?Community Transformation? Plans in Health Care Bill

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edit...2012 BABY!

patsfan13

Check out who gets money from trial lawyers and which party blocks tort reform and then look at the cost of malpractice insurance for doctors in the US compared to overseas.

Follow the moeny and connect the dots.

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"Some guys play in all-star games, some guys don't. I don't know who picks all those all-star teams. In all honesty, I don't know who picks the combine, for that matter," Belichick said. "How does (Miami-Ohio offensive lineman Brandon) Brooks not get invited to the combine? How did Vollmer not get invited to the combine? I don't know. We can't really worry about that. We just have to try to evaluate them the best we can."

BelichickFan

You guys make my head spin. Bad healthcare or too expensive ? You seem to change by the day and by the argument.

PatsFanInVa

This guy writes "brilliantly"?

It seems like the usual skin-deep analysis, to use the word generously, we've become accustomed to from the right.

So: 5% of people wait 4 months or more in the US, compared with some percentage in the 27% in Canada and 38% in Britain. But given that both countries have some species of national health care, one would think that the 27 and 38% respectively represent the entire population, whereas the 5% in the US means 5% of those who can afford surgery, because they are insured.

There are elective surgeries, which I would hope we're not talking about here. There are non-elective surgeries. Then there are the surgeries that are deemed elective if one has fallen between the cracks, or if one's insurance is exhausted (even for the well insured.)

Fifteen percent of Americans are uninsured. Right off the bat, that's 15% who wait oh I don't know, forever, for those surgeries.

As to the remainder of the article, and the remainder of the conclusions drawn, you will notice he is very excited about explaining how many CT scanners and MRIs we have. Bully! These are wonderful money-making services in the insurance game. There is a very good reason for the excess capacity.

For adequately insured Americans, as the author points out, even if a surgery is not in any way urgent or pressing, there is often plenty of capacity. You can get that procedure now, whether or not you need it now. Bully again.

Now then, what if there is a species of surgery one might need eventually, but one does not need right now? Well, if there is an incentive in providing said surgery before necessary in the US system which is absent in the Canadian and British systems, it is natural to assume that the surgery that can wait sometimes does wait.

Terrible, terrible thing that.

However, the single-payer systems evidently are making the right calls, which the almighty dollar does not do. That is why we trail countries like Canada and Britain in categories such as preventable deaths (US dead last of 19 industrialized nations.)

France best, U.S. worst in preventable death ranking (19th out of 19) - Reuters - Democratic Underground

By most measures we spend more on medicine than anybody else. On the high end of the spectrum, we have some of the foremost medicine on Earth. But as they say on the London tube, "watch the gap." The middle class and poor in America, while perhaps benefitting in a "drive-through mentality way" when from quick access to the services they can access, are not living as long or as well as elsewhere.

Your "brilliant" author makes the case that you don't get something for nothing. That's absolutely the case. In American medicine, however, we seem to have the opposite problem: all too often we get nothing for something.

I'd like to stop doing that.

PFnV

IcyPatriot

The irony of all of this is that when it comes to wasting our money uncle sam is great at it. When it comes time to spend our money on ourselves for healthcare we will be a statistic. The young contibuting taxpayers will become more valuable than the older non tax payers. Not that it will appear on any paperwork or anything. Management bonuses will be based on how much money a manager can save on the budget ... pine boxes are cheap.

PatsFanInVa

Then why focus on smoking cessation? Sort of shoots that theory down in any immediate sense, Icy.

Your point's taken, so far as it goes. It doesn't matter what else you get right, your society can be taken down with the stroke of the actuary's pen. Add five years tomorrow to everybody's life expectency, and they'd need to add another zero to the end of every deficit calculation.

Remember when they unlocked the genome and found out how aging worked and that it was an utterly unnecessary process, and they came up with the cure, but they didn't tell any of the stupid people because

DOH

okay scratch that last part

PFnV