CB, <The simple fact remains, Americans spend more on health care because we DEMAND more and GET more.>
I spend money on health care according to what I need. I only buy what I think is necessary and value for money.
Most of the money I do spend I believe is due to the medical guild cartel keeping the supply of medical services tighter than oil supplies.
A potential young doctor in New Zealand is told "Sorry, you are not allowed to study and become a doctor" purely because of restrictive trade practises. Their argument is that they don't have the capacity to produce more doctors, but the capacity is limited by the amount of money made available.
A potential young doctor isn't allowed to pay their own way.
So, there is always a shortage.
There is also criminality in the medical guild. A couple of opthalmologists were found guilty of typical money-grubbing medical guild scum-sucking criminal values contrary to their Hypocritical Oath nzma.org.nz
Note how The New Zealand Medical Journal treats the case almost as an accidental outcome of being caring about the quality of service the patients would receive. Yeah right. "We were only worried about the patients".
<The case involved an arrangement between ophthalmologists which hindered the efforts of Southern Health to hire an Australian ophthalmologist to reduce its unacceptably high waiting list for cataract surgery. The proposal from the Australian surgeon was at a very favourable price.
The incumbent ophthalmologist objected strongly to the hiring of the Australian surgeon and entered into an arrangement to oppose this with the ophthalmologist from Canterbury Health who was assisting during weekends once a month. Other ophthalmologists from Canterbury Health were drawn into that arrangement after the views of the two surgeons were discussed at a meeting, the minutes for which recorded unanimous support for the incumbent surgeon’s ‘predicament.’ Two ophthalmologists from that meeting contacted the president of the Ophthalmological Society of New Zealand (OSNZ) to enlist its help, and the supporting conduct of its president, on behalf of OSNZ, drew that society into the arrangement also. The result of this opposition was that the Australian surgeon was unable to obtain the necessary ‘oversight’ (required because he would be practicing in New Zealand for less than 4 months). >
Deregulate the medical guild and costs will plummet to human levels.
One of the absurdities is that specialists take about a decade to become a specialist. When I was 15 years old, I could have become a skin specialist by about age 16. An apprenticeship would have had me up to the standard of actual specialists "practising" now by the time I was 18.
I could handle skin cancers and other skin problems for very low prices [my alternative occupations of lifting cement bags and sheep carcasses, inter alia would have been about what I'd have done the skin services for, though manual labour is pleasurable so maybe I'd need a bit more money to do skin specialist work].
Hang on, I didn't even need that training. I'm better at diagnosis and statistics than the current skin specialist experts right now. I have personally determined that a melanoma should come off when the skin specialist thought it could stay on and be observed. The patient, who also thought it should come off, is alive and well after it was removed. Another person, who trusted the "just keep an eye on it" has been dead for 12 years [aged about 43]. I also diagnosed a squamous cell carcinoma as "That should be cut out" though three doctors had thought it nothing. When the last one did cut it out, he was surprised when the pathology report came back "squamous cell carcinoma".
I could go on and on and on about personal medical guild blunderings, [not "I heard from a friend that somebody they knew" - I mean my own personal family], some of which would have been fatal but for personal intervention.
Increase supply and competition and prices will come down. Deregulation would take a lot of the absurdity out of medical treatment. Where's the Exxon of the medical industry, with a brand to be destroyed if they mess up with patients?
I could have learned to do cataract operations for a tiny fraction of the price charged by the New Zealand convicted crooks running the cartel. There's no need to learn that the thigh bone's connected to the knee bone and all the other morass of stuff that doctors learn before they start eye surgery. A foot won't fall off because a scalpel slips into an eye. Hundreds of people could be highly skilled in specific things with little training.
Talented individuals could expand their skills over time to become general practitioners. The medical guild has it upside down. The general practitioner is lower-ranked than the specialist. It should be the reverse.
The general practitioners should be the top of top with the widest knowledge and able to give correct diagnoses and direction to the right specialists who would fix the specific problem.
Another bone to pick; how come doctors are always practising? At some stage they should know how to do it.
Mqurice |
