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To: jt101 who wrote (8042)	1/11/2003 4:12:18 PM
From: MSI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

OT: you might find it interesting that Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer to the Constitution, recognized the same thing, back in 1770's: "Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when Medicine will organize into an undercover Dictatorship... to restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and deny equal privilege to others... all such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a Republic ..." IMO, the medical industry is a near monopoly industry It's finally happened over the past few decades, in a undercover dictatorship among political and monied interests of the insurance, attorney, drug co. and hospital care industries. It's not the docs, as you might think. I'm personally seen the change since my father was a small-town doc providing free medical care to those unable to pay, compared to my brother who is unable to make a living today on the Medicare fee schedule, in spite of the incredible premiums paid by patients. If you take the $1.4 Trillion national cost of medical care, and extract what docs and nurses are paid, the corp/gov't monopoly profits appear. It's over $1 Trillion... Like oil monopolies, it's going to be hard to get rid of, they make a mystery of the accounting and are expert liars. The avg primary care physician compensation was $140k in 1997, times 700,000 equals under $100 billion or less than 1/10th of the tab back then, and 1/14th today if those numbers hold. Corp healthcare profit dramatically improves with machines and especially drugs, rather than docs. So, that's simply the direction this monopoly is going: more drugs, more machinery, fewer and lower-paid docs.