Doctors should cut their rates in half

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Doctors should cut their rates in half

(10 posts) (6 voices)

Started 2 years ago by admin
Latest reply from Sam Osborne

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admin
Key Master

The problem with health care in America is this: American doctors are practicing astronomical, unjustified, uncontrollable greed. No government-sponsored health care program can help us if we continue to allow such financial wickedness.

The Holy Bible says in 1 Timothy 6:10 "For the love of money is the root of all sorts of evils." Also, found within its content is Mark 8:36 "For what shall it profit a man (or woman) if you shall gain the world and lose your soul?"

I call forth the answer to our health care problem in America: American doctors, repent of your godless greed. Stop working to our financial ruin. Immediately cut all your prices in half. Doctors in other nations work for half of what you do and still live very high off their earnings.

Thomas Anthony
Davenport

Posted 2 years ago #
Stephen Locher
Member

How do we decide who makes too much money? Besides doctors, there are corporation lawyers, pop singers, NFL atheletes, CEOs of major corporations, winners of the Lottery, etc. Isn't there a tradition of free market and enterprise, of the rags to riches entrepreneur, inventor, popular author, of individuals' having the right to do anything not restricted by law, and charging whatever the market will pay for their services?

Posted 2 years ago #
Molly Wilson
Member

But which costs are you talking about? The costs that the insured person pays, which in all likelyhood doesn't even cover the overhead the doctor has for having provided such services? Or the cost the uninsured person pays, which now has to make up for what the doctor is losing on insured patients. The screwed up part of the economy here are the insurance companies, who have made it harder to make a living as a doctor, and have largely tied their hands in all sorts of ways. Let's blame the right people for the current cost of health care.

Posted 2 years ago #
Michael Conroy
Member

Blaming either the doctor or the patient for spiraling, out of control health care costs only diverts attention from the real problem, which is that the current system functions as a for-profit, entrepreneurial enterprise. A capitalistic, monetary incentive-based paradigm may (arguably) be fine for a widget factory or a lemonade stand, but it is never appropriate for the administration of broad social initiatives upon which the public good depends. The allocation of health care (or educational or penal services, for that matter) should never be at the mercy of a corporate mandate to maximize dividends for investors and stockholders.

As it is, money that could otherwise be spent on improving and universalizing patient care is instead flowing into the coffers of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, who in turn use it to buy our elected leaders in order to maintain the current corrupt status quo. And short of successfully effecting robust campaign finance reform— which seems almost impossible given that this is the prototypical example of the foxes voting on their own hen-house privileges— I don't see how this is likely to change.

Posted 2 years ago #
Charlotte Walker
Member

Being well insured helps to make covered costs seem not important. From my experience, the costs being charged at the UI Hospital clinics seem much too high compared to costs by private doctors and private laboratories. I wonder if any studies have been done recently about comparative local medical costs?

I'd like to see a discussion sometime about the health care system in Israel. We often hear about the health care in Canada or the UK but I sure would be interested to hear about the socialized medical care in Israel.

Posted 2 years ago #
Stephen Locher
Member

There are trade-offs between quality of care and cost which I believe will eventually lead to rationing. In Oregon, the state Medicaid program decided to put funds into prenatal care and to exclude certain kinds of bone marrow transplants. There was a trade-off between high tech, high cost, small population treatment and low cost preventive health care particularly relevant to low income populations. While the "greater good" appears to be served by such a decision, it looks different to a patient denied funding for potentially curative, though high risk, treatment for a fatal disease.

Who will decide how to allocate resources to health care? Who will determine what is an acceptable level of care for specific diagnoses? I agree with Michael Conroy that a profit-based free market insurance enterprise seems a poor choice to make such health care decisions, and I am not sure how physicians would manage the conflict of interest between high dollar treatments and low cost interventions when their personal incomes are strongly affected. There are groups of physicians who have set treatment standards based on levels of supporting evidence, but even in these cases, there are often a range of choices, and there are trade-offs between cost vs years of life saved. Simply stated, what is good quality care, and how much are we willing to pay for it?

At some point, as a society we will have to make decisions on where and how to draw the line on medical interventions. The very large sums spent on the last year of life are a case in point. How much do we spend to ward off impending death? Who decides whether it's hospice or two weeks in ICU?

Posted 2 years ago #
Michael Conroy
Member

We already have rationing, we already "draw the line" on medical interventions, so this isn't something we might have to face in the future, but a simple fact of life right now. It's just that the current rationing system is based on one's ability to pay. So the only relevant question is: Do we want to continue to entrust our health care allocation decision-making to oligarchs who care for nothing at all except for the numbers that appear on their quarterly reports? Or do we want to find a more humane alternative?

I agree that under a single payer, universal coverage scenario difficult rationing decisions would still occasionally have to be made, the details of which could be debated and discussed. But I'm hard-pressed to think of a more depraved system than the one we have now, in which decisions of life and death are reduced to the level of mere capitalist commodity. Plus, when we stop feeding the vast parasitical infrastructure that has developed for the sole purpose of fattening the wallets of a powerful few, eliminating the redundancy of having thousands of different bureaucratic and administrative overseers, we will have a great deal more funds left over to actually care for the sick..

Posted 2 years ago #
Sam Osborne
Member

My doctors are worth every penny that is tricked down to them through the private health-insurance scam. And this private health insurance scam is financed via subsidized, expensed and deducted revenues skimmed from the tax base---and the revenue shortfall is made up by tax payers whether or not they can afford their own health care. They pay the high cost of premiums that provide huge profits to those that control this tax-entitlement racket.

WellPoint, that operates BlueCross in 14 states make $4.7 billion last year but plans on increasing its premium by 25 to 39% and the tax payer will be picking this up on top of the huge cost of what is now sucked in from tax payers.

Meanwhile medical professionals provide the world’s greatest health care that is so good that people of means come from around the world to secure its benefits, but they do not come to buy the lousy private health insurance. The American tax payer get stuck with that bill.

Posted 2 years ago #
Stephen Locher
Member

Michael,

I very much agree with your view that rationing is already here, and that it is driven primarily by profit-oriented financial concerns.

It is true that insurers pay attention to the guidelines published by groups of physicians, which rate treatment interventions in terms of the degree of evidence supporting the level and mode of treatment, so the rationing is also based on "standards of care" accepted in the relevant medical community. The down-side is that cutting edge advances may not meet the published criteria, depriving patients of potentially superior treatments. And it can be difficult to get some treatments for patients who don't fit neatly into the diagnostic categories, or for whom the rareness of the disease means that there is no recognized standard of care, although a plausible rationale can be made by the physician.

The effect of following these "standards of care" is typically an improvement in the bottom line, as at least some of these patients will be denied coverage for treatment recommended by their physicians. On the health care side, some fringe/free-wheeling and irresponsible medical recommendations are squelched.

Sam, The flip side of foreigners coming to th U.S. for care are the US Citizens who choose to live in Europe because they can get comprehensive health care, even if they eke out only modest livings, as free lance artists, for example.

Posted 2 years ago #
Sam Osborne
Member

The nation spends more on health care than any other in the world and gets the poorest return on the expenditure. And as pointed out, the actual medical care is so outstanding that people of means come from around the world to secure it, but not to buy the lousy private insurance.

Private health insurance is a middleman scam of subsidized, expensed and deducted premiums costs that are skimmed from tax base revenues and made up by tax payers whether or not they can afford their own health care---a private corporate entitlement.

The private insurance gatekeepers something they neither own nor invest in, medical science and technology. This prices millions of people out of care and into neglect of early health problems and brings last ditch emergency-room treatment for conditions that deteriorate into costly situations. This elevates the overall cost to actual providers, and to stay in operation they defray these expenses into collectable costs that do not displease or expose the piratical insurers.

Posted 2 years ago #

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