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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (14964)	11/3/2003 11:57:40 AM
From: MSI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793624

It's a vicious spiral. Not only are costs going up, the cost increases cause further bureaucratic blizzards, legal quagmires, pharmaceutical and insurance company opportunities. Each one bumps the cost of the other. As long as the taxpayer/patient is willing to fork over more of his income, costs will continue to increase. There is a vicious monopoly in medicine that can't be broken without gov't intervention, one of the few places I'm in favor of significant gov't involvement to create full disclosure. The first to notice this was a signer to the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush, who said the following shocking statement: "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 privileges to others; the Constitution of the Republic should make a special privilege for medical freedoms as well as religious freedom." Benjamin Rush, MD., a signer of the Declaration of Independence and personal physician to George Washington resultsproject.net

To: LindyBill who wrote (14964)	11/3/2003 12:13:15 PM
From: MSI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793624

Brief anecdote re: medical costs I got a benign growth on my forehead removed surgically in a routine office visit. When I complained about not being given alternatives to the small scar, I was referred to a specialist for another such growth, who happily told me the cost for a procedure called Mohs would be $5k to $15k and take 4-8hrs in the office. I called a family member who is a doctor, who told me about Aldara, a cream that would likely do the same thing. Neither physician told me about this, until I confronted them, and when I used it the growths were dissolved. So, here we have an escalation based on judgements of the only resource a layman has, the medical/legal/industrial community, ignoring a $200 treatment in favor of $5k to $15k treatment. The profit motive is well-hidden beneath medical technology, but amounts to a choice between making $100 profit or $10,000 profit. The solution is full disclosure and a gov't sponsored up-to-date database of disorders, treatments and outcomes, easily accessible to the layman.