<The famous medical cartel.... Tell me, if they're so powerful, how come primary care medicine is, apparently, on the list of jobs that "Americans won't do"? By now, close to half of our PCP's are foreign trained.> As many cartels find, it's not a simple matter to ring fence a captive market and charge extorquerationate prices. OPEC for example is very leaky and anyway, people don't have to buy oil. They can buy insulation, a bicycle or an electric car. Or use Skype instead of an A380.
There are many rules such as not allowing people to buy things they want such as Rituxan unless they can get a doctor to allow them to do so. The medical cartel is big and powerful. The FDA stands astride the lot.
As you point out, the big bucks are in ring-fenced specialities where the cartel is much tighter. So of course 97% of them plan on going for the big bucks and a more genteel environment.
Now that I think of it, our son died last year of a vitamin B12 deficiency which he would not have done if he had been allowed by the cartel to do what he wanted to do a couple of decades ago which was become a preventative medicine doctor.
The medical cartel said he was not allowed to do so as they had rules for allowing people to become medical students and he didn't fit the rules having been to Yamate High School in Japan for a year having achieved scholarship success at high school in NZ having just turned 16 and then taken another year to go snow-boarding.
His fate was a lesson in how vast human ignorance is. It seems absurd that he did not know and neither did I that vitamin B12 is ONLY available from animal products or Made in a Factory supplements. Life is certainly an adventure in ignorance, guesswork, luck and hope, albeit leavened some applied intelligence.
He would not have been ignorant about vitamin B12 and would not have unthinkingly adopted the orthorexic dietary strictures of the woman he thought he loved. She knew to take supplements and he didn't. She didn't tell him he had to take vitamin B12 or he'd die. But I'm not sure that she was getting enough and certainly their daughter [aged 3 at the time] did not as a blood test showed once our son Tarken was found to be at 59 pmol per litre.
You are right that Cyberspace will provide a lot of medical advice which it already does. Paying big heaps to be allowed to buy an aspirin is unattractive.
Free markets, free enterprise. Maximum degrees of freedom. Down with ignorance. Down with Big Brother.
Mqurice |
